THE 



ESSAYS OF AN OPTIMIST. 



BY 

JOHN WILLIAM KAYE, F.R.S. 

AUTHOR OF 

'HISTORY OF THE WAR IN AFFGHANISTAN," " LIFE OF LORD METCALFE,' 

" HISTORY OF THE SEPOY AVAR.'' ETC. ETC. 



LONDON: 
SMITH, ELDER & CO., 15, WATERLOO PLACE. 

1870. 



[The Rig/it of Translation is Reserved.] 






[Originally published in the "Cornhill Magazine," i86o-t8 7 o.J 

/¥3olo 



/ <^3 



/>*- 



TO THE FRIENDS, 



WHOSE UNFAILING KINDNESS HAS SUSTAINED THROUGH LIFE 



MY FAITH IN MY FELLOW- MEN, 



» little Sfl»fc 



IS GRATEFULLY AND LOVINGLY INSCRIBED. 



PREFACE. 



The papers now gathered together in this volume 
have been composed at intervals during the last 
ten years, and have been published in the Cornhill 
Magazine. They have been mostly written at 
times when I have been separated from the 
materials of my graver work, from books and 
documents and piles of correspondence ; written 
in country inns, or sea-side lodgings, or other 
strange places far away from home ; when I have 
wished not to be quite idle, but when I could not, 
if I would, have devoted myself to more sub- 
stantial labours, and, very truthfully, I may add, 



viii PREFACE. 

when I would not if I could. They have been 
principally holiday-tasks, written by snatches, and 
sent off, piece by piece, as they were written — 
the loose thoughts of a loose thinker, desultory, 
discursive, pretending only to express in plain 
colloquial language some of the opinions and 
experiences of the writer on subjects within the 
range of our common sympathies. 

I had no particular design when I wrote them. 
I did not .purpose that, running on in one groove, 
they Should illustrate any special philosophy. But 
on reperusing them, I have thought that there is a 
prevailing unity of sentiment in the Essays, which 
warrants the descriptive title which I have given to 
them ; and not the less so, because this harmony is 
the result, not of any foregone intention, but of 
the spontaneous repetitions of the writer — those 
involuntary harpings upon the same string, which 
come from a settled faith in the truths which thus 
seek utterance in his pages. The doctrine is no- 



PREFACE. ix 

thing more than that it is wise to look for good in 
everything, or, more closely to represent the name 
which I have chosen, to "make the best of it" 
There are some natures which recognize this truth 
unawares — which do not know it, do not think of 
it, but habitually feel it. To them it is a sentiment, 
not a doctrine. It expresses itself in the Divine 
incense of thanksgiving to God, mingled with 
unfailing charity towards Man. It rises up heaven- 
wards in great pseans of praise and love warm from 
the heart. For readers of this kind there is no 
need that Essays on Optimism should be w r ritten. 
But there are others to whom it may be profitable 
thus to be taught to look ever for the bright side, 
alike of what comes from God and what comes 
from Man — to rejoice always in the unceasing 
goodness of the Almighty, and to discern good, 
wheresoever they can find it, in the lives of their 
neighbours. In this Optimism are included Faith, 
Hope, and Charity — all three. We cannot, there- 



x PREFACE. 

fore, go far wrong in cultivating it ; and there is 
nothing that will add more to our happiness than 
its cultivation, singing and making melody in our 
hearts and giving thanks always for all things, It 
makes sunshine in shady places, and keeps us in 
an habitual state, not only of resignation, but of 
cheerfulness. It would be absurd to say that I 
do not know anything that reconciles us more to " 
the trials and troubles of life than an assured 
belief that all things work together for our good ; 
for there is nothing else that can reconcile us to 
them at all. There are few who do not recognize 
this truth in its general acceptation ; but do they 
practically apply it to the details of life ? " It 
conduces much," says old Jeremy Taylor, "to our 
content, if w r e pass by those things which happen 
to our trouble, and consider that which is pleasing 
and prosperous, that by the representation of the 
better the worse may be blotted out." And he 
tells us how to do this, amidst all the chances and 



PREFACE. xi 

changes of life. There is a quaintness in some of 
his recommendations which may raise a smile ; 
but there is not, on that account, less sound philo- 
sophy in them ; and we may profitably ponder 
what he says.* 

And then with respect to our faith in our 
fellow-men, it is surely pleasanter to believe than 
to doubt, even though belief may bring its 
troubles with it. We may sometimes be mistaken, 
sometimes deceived. All men are in the course 
of their lives. But what a balance of good is 
there on the other side ! Let us think of those 
whom we have found truthful and honourable, 
tender and generous, who have stood by us 
through good report and evil report — who have 
succoured us in adversity and made us rejoice in 
our distresses, because without such trials we 
should not have proved the strength and genuine- 

* See the chapter on " Contentment" in the Holy Living \ from 
which the passage in the text is taken. 



xii PREFACE. 

ness of their affection. And even to those who 
wrong us, our gratitude is due. For if we had 
* no wrongs to endure we should have nothing to 
forgive ; and the most godlike of all privileges 
would be denied to us. 

But now that I have collected these articles, 
read them all over again (mostly after a long 
interval of time), and revised them for the Press, 
I do not — though from time to time, as fugitive 
pieces, they have earned encouraging eulogies both 
from friends and strangers — feel at all sure that they 
are worthy of preservation in this volume. Assailed 
by these misgivings, I must confess that I have a 
personal feeling to gratify (I do not mind its being 
called vanity) in acknowledging the paternity of 
these papers, and endeavouring to obtain a few 
more readers for them. I have written some big 
books in my time, and I hope, if life be spared, to 
write some more. I was told, only the other day, 
by a very accomplished and learned friend, that I 



PREFACE. xiii 

had just committed the grave mistake of writing 
one of the heaviest books ever written. On my 
expressing a modest regret that he had not been 
able to read it, he told me at once that he had 
not tried (and I never expect that he will try), but 
that it was a prodigious weight in his hands. I 
have got a fancy, therefore, to publish a little book, 
which will not be a burden to the flesh, and I 
hope not to the spirit, and so, perhaps, to find a 
score or two of readers, who have never ventured 
to make acquaintance with me in weighty histo- 
rical volumes — friends, perhaps; perhaps strangers, 
who will not turn aside from this light bundle of 
Essays on every- day topics as from a heavy work 
on a subject of no personal interest to themselves ; 
whilst some, I hope, who have ventured on my 
bulkier efforts, will not be disinclined to follow me 
for a little space along new paths of inquiry. And 
if I should succeed either in making a new friend, 
or in pleasing an old one, through the help of this 



xiv PREFACE. 

little volume, it will not have been published in 
vain. 

I have appended to each of the Essays the 
date at which it was originally published ; so that, 
if any acute reader should discern that on some 
points there are slight divergencies of opinion (I 
do not say that there are any) scattered over the 
entire work, he may see in the later utterance the 
riper experience, the more mature judgment of 
the writer. I have added a few notes, dated 1870, 
which refer rather to change of circumstances than 
to change of opinion, following the first publica- 
tion of the Essays. 

J. W. K. 



Penge, October, 1870. 



CONTENTS. 



Page 

Holidays i 

Work 29 

Success 77 

The Wrong Side of the Stuff 112 

On Growing Old 152 

On Toleration 194 

Rest 246 



" He that hath so many causes of joy, and so great, 
is very much in love with sorrow and peevishness, who 
loses all these pleasures, and chooses to sit down on 
his little handful of thorns. such a person is fit to 
bear Nero company in his funeral sorrow for the loss 
of one of Poppea's hairs, or help to mourn for Lesbia's 
sparrow ; and because he loves it, he deserves to starve 
in the midst of plenty, and to want comfort whilst he 
is encircled with blessings." — Jeremy Taylor. 



ESSAYS OF AN OPTIMIST. 



HO LID A VS. 




T is a blessed thought, all through the long 
work-day months of the early part of the 
year, that, if we only live long enough, 
we must drift into August. For with August 
comes to many toil-worn men — would that it came 
to all ! — one of God's best gifts to man, a holiday. 
There is a lull in the mighty clatter of the 
machinery of life ; the great wheels are still, or 
they gyrate slowly and noiselessly. How it hap- 
pens, it is hard to say [and the harder the more 
you think about it, for man's wants and man's 
passions, which make work, are never still] ; but 
the Autumnal Sabbath comes round as surely as 
the shorter days and the yellower leaves ; and 

i 



2 HO LID A VS. 

from the great heart of the metropolis we go out in 
search of a cheerier life and a fresher atmosphere. 

There is, doubtless, a special Providence de- 
creeing this, so that even the delirium of kings, 
out of which come the wrestlings of nations, is 
for a time subdued ; * and thus the Nestors of the 
State are suffered, like meaner men, to grow young 
again in the heather and the turnip-field. The 
High Court of Parliament sets the example, 
removes itself from the sphere of our weekly 
prayers, and diffuses itself over vast expanses of 
country, in quest of new wisdom and new strength, 
and plentiful amusement, which is both, Then 
Justice takes the bandage from her eyes, lays 
down her scales, tucks up her flowing robes, and 
girds herself for a walking tour half-way over 
Europe with a pipe in her mouth. The Exchange 
quickly follows suit. Commerce grows a mous- 
tache, assumes the wideawake, goes sketching on 
the Rhine, and draws pictures of Ehrenbreitstein, 

* A decade has passed since this was written (in i860), and the 
whirligig of time has brought in a terrible revenge. There now seems 
to be only a grim sarcasm in the simple words written ten years ago 
in such good faith and on what seemed to be the security of historical 
facts. But who will ever think, after this August of 1870, of the 
delirium of kings respecting the Holiday season ?— ( 1870). 



BLESSINGS OF LABOUR. 

instead of bills of exchange. And so we all pour 
ourselves out into the great reservoir of idleness ; 
and we do our appointed work thereby more surely 
than if we plodded all the time at our desks. 

We are coming to understand this, as a nation, 
better than we once did ; but we have not yet so 
hearty an appreciation of the truth, but that a few 
reflections on the subject from an old fellow like 
myself may have their uses just on the verge of 
autumn. What I have to say is mainly in praise 
of holidays. I have a becoming sense of what is 
called the " dignity of labour," but, more than 
that, I believe that of all the blessings and be- 
nignities of life, work is verily the greatest. The 
bread w T hich w r e earn by the sw r eat of the brow, 
and brain-sweat is therein included, is the sweetest 
that is ever eaten. A dull life, and one that I 
would not care to live, would be a life without 
labour. So patent, indeed, is this — so often has it 
been demonstrated — that men not born to work, 
make work for themselves. Not being harnessed 
by the iron hand of Necessity into the go-cart of 
daily labour, they harness themselves into go-carts 
of their own, and drag the burden after them as 
lustily as the rest. We envy one another blindly 



4 HO LID A VS. 

and ignorantly, neither knowing our neighbour's 
sorenesses and sufferings, nor rightly appreciating 
beatitudes of our own, We have all our joys and 
sorrows — God be praised for both ! — and more 
equally dispensed than many care to acknowledge. 
Toil-worn men, indeed, will not readily believe 
that their hard grinding work is foremost in the 
category of their blessings. They know it is very 
easy and very pleasant to be idle for a day, or for 
a week, perhaps for a month : but if they were to 
try a life of idleness they would find how hard a 
life it is. The wise physician, who recommended 
Locuples, as a remedy for all his aches and pains, 
his causeless anxieties, his asperities of temper, the 
gloom and despondency of his whole life, " to live 
upon a shilling a day and earn it," probed the rich 
man's ailments to their very depths, and prescribed 
the only cure for such imaginary distempers. Let 
Locuples work and be happy. Locuples has, now- 
a-days, some notion of this, and so he works, as I 
have said, of his own free-will, turning legislator, 
and magistrate, and poor-law guardian, and colonel 
of volunteers, and lecturing to Mechanics' Insti- 
tutes, and writing books, and getting profitable 
place, if he can, in the great omnibus of the State. 



DUTY OF REST. 5 

And what can be wiser ? For if there were no 
work for Locuples, there would be no holidays. 

And as there can be no holidays without work, 
so ought there to be no work without holidays ; 
the one, indeed, is the natural complement of the 
other. Labour and rest, in fitting proportions, are 
the conditions of healthy life. This everybody 
knows and admits. But there is a poor, weak, 
cowardly feeling often lurking in men's minds, 
which will not suffer them honestly to believe and 
to declare, that it is as much the duty of man to 
rest as to labour. We are wont, in a sneaking, 
contemptible sort of way, to apologize for our 
holidays, as though they were no better than small 
sins, delinquencies, aberrations, to be compounded 
for by additional labour and self-denial. But, 
rightly considered, rest and amusement, or, in a 
word, holidays, are a substantive part of the 
" whole duty of man ; " and to neglect that duty, 
or to suffer others to neglect it, is no less a crime 
against our common manhood than to suffer our 
energies to run to waste in indifference and in- 
action, and to do nothing for ourselves or for man- 
kind. Have we any right to over-eat ourselves, 
or to over- drink ourselves, or to over-any thing-else 



6 HOLIDA VS. 

ourselves ? Then what right have we to over- 
work ourselves ? " Moderate passions/' says an 
old writer, " are the best expressions of humanity." 
Let there be moderation, then, even in the passion 
for work. We must not wear out this mighty 
tabernacle of the human frame, and this god-like 
intellect of man, by an unseemly demand on their 
resources. A very old proverb is that about the 
bow, which is always bent ; but it is not so old that 
men in this generation do not sometimes require 
to be reminded of it. The Chinese have another 
proverb to the effect that one day is as good as 
three, if you will only do the right thing at the 
right time. The Chinese are a wise people, and 
I hope that, when we go to war with them, we 
shall catch some of their wisdom. It is not the 
time that he bestows upon his work, but the 
system which he carries to it, and the energy 
which he infuses into it, that enables the work- 
man to do his appointed business with success. 

I carry, to the best of my poor ability, these 
little fancies of mine into the practice of daily 
life. I work as hard as I can. My friends are 
pleased sometimes to say, very kindly, that they 
wonder I contrive to get through so much work. 



VICARIOUS PLEASURES. 7 

My answer, when the remark is made in my own 
presence, most frequently is, that I do contrive it 
by playing as much as I can. I am getting on in 
years, and I speak more of the past than of the 
present. But man is never too old to play, by 
himself or by proxy ; and the vicarious disportings 
of advancing age are not the least of the pleasures 
and privileges of man. If we cannot stand up at 
Lord's to the catapultian bowling of this generation, 
mindful as we are of the times when Mr. Budd, not, 
perhaps, without some pardonable feelings of 
vanity derived from a consciousness of the perfect 
anatomy of his lower limbs, kept wicket and 
i% lobbed " at the opposite stumps, in nankin shorts 
and pink silk stockings : if we cannot venture to 
compete with the athletes of different communities, 
who now go in for astonishing broad jumps, and 
high jumps, and hurdle races, and puttings and 
pickings-up of stones, at various places of gre- 
garious resort : we can at all events look on, and 
let our ashes sparkle up from contact with the fires 
of younger men ; and cry, Vixi ptiellis y &c, and 
live again in the energies of our boys. 

And if I take a holiday myself, whenever I can, 
without injury to others, I am no less minded to 



8 HO LID A YS, 

give the young people, who serve under me in the 
department of her Majesty's Government to which 
I am honoured by belonging, a holiday whenever 
they ask for it. I do not find that they take more 
holidays, or that they do less work than others, 
because I am willing to suit their convenience in 
such matters, exhorting them, indeed, to go abroad 
when the sun shines, and to disport themselves in 
a clear atmosphere. I have one or two famous 
cricketers among my young gentlemen, of whose 
exploits I am reasonably proud ; and I am more 
than reconciled for any little inconvenience to 
which I may be subjected in their absence, if I see 
a good score opposite to their names in the papers 
next day. There are new occasions for holidays 
creeping in from that great volunteer movement 
which is now energizing the land. And surely, 
one would be wanting in a becoming sense of 
loyalty towards our Sovereign Lady the Queen, to 
grudge a holiday to a lusty youth desirous of per- 
fecting himself in the rifle-exercise, by which our 
enemies, if we have any, are to be grievously dis- 
comfited and overborne. I have heard it said that 
it is liable to abuse, and that rifle-practice may be 
a cover for worse practices, or a pretext for much 



FINE WEATHER. 9 

unprofitable idling. And so is church-going, for 
the matter of that — and other excellent things, 
easily to be named — susceptible of this kind of 
abuse. But the primary reflection which this sug- 
gests to my mind is, that no one ought to need an 
excuse for taking a holiday. If society were rightly 
constituted, holidays in the abstract would be so 
respectable and so respected, that they could derive 
no additional gloss or dignity from any adven- 
titious circumstance of rifle movement, or royal 
birthday, or that famous national institution, the 
great Derby race. I know no better reason for a 
holiday than that which we were wont to urge at 
school, namely, that it was a fine day, sometimes 
gaining our point by means of a Latin epistle, in 
prose or verse, to the Doctor, with a good deal in 
it about Phoebus resplendens, aura mitis, and pueri 
jocundi. I am afraid that such a plea would not 
be considered admissible in the school which I now 
attend. But I have often thought, when I have 
seen from my official windows the bright morning 
sun burnishing the Victoria Tower and " Big Ben," 
that, if I were head - master, I should like to 
summon my boys, and say to them, " Now, then, 
out into the country, and enjoy yourselves ; " and 



io HO LI DA VS. 

to put a placard on the door, " Gone for a holiday 
— back to-morrow.'' 

It may be imputed to me, I know, by the 
enemies of holiday-making — whereof there are, I 
am afraid, thousands — that I am boasting only of 
giving holidays to servants not my own, — that I 
am lavish of other people's property. To this I 
am not minded to reply further than that I know 
what is best for her Majesty's service and for my 
own ; and that in my own modest establishment, 
the domestics are never denied a holiday when 
they ask for one, and often prompted to take one 
when they do not ask. It is a small matter for 
me to take my chop in Westminster on that day, 
or to carry some sandwiches to office in my pocket, 
that I may forego the parade of dinner, and 
emancipate Mary, Jane, and Martha for a day at 
the Crystal Palace at Sydenham — an institution 
which, as an aid, not to say an incentive, to 
holiday-making, I hold in the highest esteem. 
Are they never to breathe the fresh air or to see 
the green leaves, because I pay them a yearly 
wage of from twelve to twenty pounds, and have 
some covenants with them on the score of tea and 
sugar ? Are holidays only for heads of families 



MASTER AND SERVANT. u 

— masters or mistresses, as the case may be — and 
for the dumb animals who serve them ? There are 
those, I know, who think them sheer impertinences, 
and esteem it dire presumption in menials to ask 
for holidays, even to see their parents and their 
little brothers and sisters, a few miles off. Is the 
love of kindred to be denied to them no less than 
the love of nature ? Can any one really hope to 
get good service out of reasonable beings by stifling 
their natural instincts and silencing the voice of 
their hearts ? God be praised that there are some 
who think differently about obligations of this 
kind ! There is my friend Loneyouchter, for 
example, the kindest of human beings, and one of 
the cleverest withal, who beat all his contempo- 
raries, of whom I was one, in his younger days, 
with such facility that it was only to be likened to 
the case of " Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere ; " 
he told me, the other day, in his pleasant villa, on 
the summit of one of the Norwood hills, that he 
had given his servants " season-tickets " for the 
Crystal Palace. Whereupon, I honoured the man, 
even more than I had done before. But mention- 
ing the circumstance soon afterwards to a fair young 
girl, she described it as a " mad freak." It appeared 






12 HOLIDAYS. 

to me to be the sanest thing that had recently 
been brought to my notice. 

The sanest in all respects — sanity itself, and 
the cause of sanity in others. For surely the mens 
sana in corpore sa7io is promoted by harmless 
entertainment of this kind ; and health and cheer- 
fulness are the very foundation-stones of good 
service. If we think of nothing else but of getting 
the largest possible amount of yearly work out of 
a human machine, we must take care not to keep 
it in motion from morning to night for three 
hundred and sixty-five days in the year. It has 
often surprised me that men, who in their dealings 
with the brute creation have so clear an under- 
standing of this matter, should in their transactions 
with what horse-doctors somewhat disparagingly 
call "the human subject" exhibit so great a defi- 
ciency of common sense. Happening, a few weeks 
ago, to be travelling on the top of an omnibus 
bound for a railway station in South Wales, I 
became the highly interested auditor of an ani- 
mated conversation between the driver of that 
public conveyance and two or three decently- 
dressed men on the seat behind him, who might 
have been small farmers or bailiffs. The subject 



OUT TO GRASS. 13 

of discourse was primarily the sale and purchase 
of a certain fast-trotting mare, very celebrated 
upon the road. The price given and the sums 
offered at different times for the accomplished 
animal having been well discussed, and having 
elicited an amount of private information " on the 
best possible authority," such as would have done 
no discredit to the discussion of an important 
historical question, the properties and qualifica- 
tions of the mare were brought under review. 
Hereupon some diversities of opinion arose ; but 
there was wonderful agreement upon one point, 
namely, that the mare had been overworked, and 
that she must be turned out for a time to set her 
right on her legs again. Whether blistering would 
accomplish a perfect cure, or whether anything 
short of firing would do it, appeared to be an open 
question ; but it was unanimously agreed that the 
holiday was the main thing. And from particulars, 
the company on the coach-top betook themselves 
to generals, and discoursed feelingly on the cruelty 
and folly of overworking a good horse, of keeping 
him always in harness, instead of turning him out 
sometimes to grass. To all of which I silently 
assented, for I remembered that I had once been 



1 4 HO LI DA VS. 

" peccant in this kinde " myself, having ridden, in 
my younger and more thoughtless days, a willing 
horse to a remote railway station and back again, 
a distance in all of some two-and-twenty miles > ..so 
often without taking account of the strain upon 
the poor animal's system, that one day she sud- 
denly, when many miles from any help, broke out 
into a profuse sweat, drooped her head, and never 
recovered. She fairly broke down in the midst of 
her work — and I never think of the fact now with- 
out shame and humiliation. 

But I opine that it did me good — that it taught 
me to think more seriously of my obligations to 
man and beast — for I believe that I never offended 
after this fashion again. I sympathized from my 
heart with all that was said on the subject by the 
travellers on the Welsh omnibus, in the simple 
quadrupedal sense wherein they were fain to con- 
sider it ; but I wondered, at the same time, how it 
happens that, whilst the generality of mankind 
thoroughly understand the subject in this sense, 
there are so many able and amiable men unwilling 
or incompetent to apply the very obvious principle 
to the larger concerns of human life. It irks me 
to think that there are legions of excellent persons 



GRUDGINGS AND STINTINGS. 15 

who would on no account overwork their horses — 
who have a lively appreciation of the necessity of 
occasional weeks or months of rest — who know 
that to grudge these periods of inactivity to their 
equine friends is, in proverbial phrase, " penny- 
wise and pound foolish " — but who have neither 
the same tender consciences nor the same shrewd 
sense to aid them in their relations with those who 
carry them along the highways and byways of 
business and domestic life ; masters who refuse 
that to their human dependants, in house or office, 
w T hich they grant willingly to the " beasts which 
perish." 

I had a friendly disputation on this subject the 
other day with my neighbour, Mr. Gallicap, a great 
Italian merchant in the city, a most worthy man, 
and the father of a very interesting family. I fear 
that I did not succeed in making him a convert to 
my views, but I know that I had the sympathies 
and best wishes of his sons and daughters, to say 
nothing of his amiable lady ; and I was greatly en- 
couraged by the earnest, intelligent face of little 
Carry Gallicap, who sat by and listened to the 
discourse with evident approbation of the senti- 
ments I expressed. Indeed, I generally find that 



1 6 HOLIDAYS. 

my younger auditors are heart and soul on my 
side. The argument employed upon the other was 
mainly that of the laudator temporis acti. There 
was not wont to be so much talk about holidays 
thirty or forty years ago. Young men went to 
their business early and returned late : indeed, on 
foreign post-nights were often kept at their work 
till close upon midnight. If they were ill, they 
went home, and the heads of large houses were not 
wont to be illiberal to them. He had got on well 
enough in his younger days without holidays ; why 
should he take them in his older ? Why should 
not his sons do as their father had done before 
them ? Why should they have shorter work-days, 
and fewer of them, in the course of the year ? And 
how was business to go on if every one went away ? 
To this I observed deferentially, that " every 
one" was a strong word. And I ventured to 
allude to the system in force at the public offices, 
which provides for the continual presence of some 
efficient officer of a department, and yet enables 
every one to take his holiday at some time or 
other of the year — a system which, as enabling 
juniors to feel their way to higher duties, has its 
uses in another sense. I alluded laughingly, too, 



SUNDAYS. 17 

to the famous saying of a certain great statesman, 
who alleged that he divided his business into three 
parts — one part he did ; another did itself; and the 
third was not done at all. But I perceived that 
public offices and public men were not held of 
much account by my opponent, and that my 
argument gained little or nothing by a reference 
to them. Indeed, he was pleased to observe, that 
if his firm had done business after the manner of 
the public offices, it would have been bankrupt 
long ago — a proposition which I did not dispute, 
but which I could not admit to be convincing 
against holidays. Indeed, nothing could ever 
convince me that it is not the duty of every 
employer, great and small, to give his workmen 
a reasonable number of holidays in every year. 

" And have they not," I may be asked — " has 
not every workman in this Christian land fifty-two 
holidays in every year ? " Truly, there is, for most 
of us, one holiday in every week — one day, set 
apart by God, and given to man to keep it holy. 
It is the holiest of all holy days — a blessed day of 
rest ; vouchsafed to us, apart from its spiritual 
uses, that we may re-create our exhausted energies. 
But " recreation," as it is popularly understood, is 

2 



i8 HOLIDAYS. 

out of the category of orthodox things. Sunday is 
a day of routine — the best of all possible routines, 
it is true — but still we have our appointed duties ; 
and my idea of a holiday is that we should be 
emancipated from all routine ; that we should have 
no appointed duties. Besides, who can really enjoy 
Sunday, when the ghastly image of Monday peers 
over its quiet shoulder ? 

We have come now to look upon the word, in 
its ordinary acceptation, as something distinct 
altogether from its etymological meaning, and are 
wont to associate it with ideas rather of a Bohemian 
or vagabondizing kind of life, than of anything 
stationary and domestic. The right thing, indeed, 
is to " go out for a holiday ; " to seek change of 
scene, and change of air, and change of action ; to 
divest one's-self of all the environments of work- 
day life ; to enter, as it were, into a new state of 
being, as does the grub when he eventuates into a 
butterfly, and spreads his wings in the summer air. 
Grateful, indeed, ought this generation to be for 
the benignant aid of steam, which affords unfailing 
facilities to holiday-makers seeking change of scene 
and air, carrying them to remote places within an 
hour's space, and suffering them to see hundreds of 



BLESS LYGS OF STEAM. 19 

miles of country, in a single day, for a few shillings. 
It is no small thing that in these times a toil-worn 
artisan may transport himself from the stifling alley 
or the reeking court in which he lives, to the fresh, 
breezy coast of Brighton, for half-a-crown, and be 
carried home again for nothing. Or if he is not 
minded to go so far a-field, there is the Crystal 
Palace at Sydenham, or the royal palace at 
Hampton Court, or the Rye House, famous in 
history for its plot, to all of which he may make 
pleasant excursions at. a small charge, and travel 
out of himself as thoroughly as though he were 
new-born, going back into a past, or onward into 
a future age, and forgetting all the wearing toil 
and carking anxiety of the present. There is 
nothing pleasanter than the sight of a railway- 
train freighted with excursionists outward-bound, 
all radiant with the expectation of a day's 
pleasure. And such may be seen now-a-days in 
the outskirts of every large town on summer and 
autumn mornings ; for London has no monopoly 
of such blessings. If the South has its Brighton, 
the North has its Scarborough ; and, indeed, it is 
easy everywhere to rush out of the smoke. I hear 
people who can take their month's holiday when 



20 HO LID A VS. 

they like, and travel by express trains, and get up 
extensive outfits for the occasion, with all sorts of 
elaborate contrivances suggestive of nothing less 
than an expedition into Central Africa, sneer at 
these excursions, as things snobbish ; but it seems 
to me that the sneerers are the real snobs, and that 
I have seen, in first-class carriages, extensively 
got-up holiday-makers of both sexes, far more 
vulgar because more pretentious, than the poor 
little Pippas of the silk mills treated by their 
admiring swains to half-a-crown's worth of fresh 
air and green leaves in the pleasant country. 
And a ripe, rich comfort ought it to be to all who 
get their holidays regularly every year, without let 
or hindrance, and perhaps, without injury to them- 
selves and others, that the blessings which they 
enjoy are now within the reach of millions less 
favoured by fortune than themselves. And I hope, 
too, that they who look up from the lower strata 
of society at people sleeker than themselves, in 
richer purple, and in finer linen, do not grudge 
them their holidays, and say, " What have they 
to do with such things ? is not life all a holiday to 
them ? " Indeed, it is not, my friend. Purple and 
fine linen do not make holidays, any more than 



ESCAPE INTO THE COUNTRY. 21 

they make happiness. Let us rejoice in the enjoy- 
ments of each other. Let us shake hands over the 
blessed privilege of a few days' rest. Is it rest 
of body, or rest of mind ? What matters ! Bodily 
labour and mental labour, both have their privi- 
leges, and both have their pains. Let us not envy 
— let us honour one another. If Hand goes to 
Rye House, and Head to Wiesbaden, for a holiday, 
let us hope that each is equally benefited by the 
change, and equally thankful for it. 

If the real want, the need, of a holiday, is to be 
measured by the enjoyment of it when it comes, I 
am sure that the upper ten thousand need it as 
much as any mechanics in the land. Belonging 
myself to the middle classes, I can answer for their 
appreciation, and I know that there is nothing 
keener. To dwellers in large towns, especially in 
this great overgrown Babylon of ours, there is a 
sense of enjoyment in the simple escape into the 
country apart from the cessation of daily labour. 
How intensely are the first few days at the sea-side 
enjoyed by all the members of a London family ! 
I remember to have heard a dear little boy, some 
nine years old, on the green hill-side of a Welsh 
watering-place, say to his father, as hand-in-hand 



22 HOLIDA VS. 

they clomb the ascent, " Dear papa ! this is so 
jolly, I can hardly believe it to be true." And papa 
responded heartily, as though he thought it, with 
as much sincerity as his child. The first pink 
flush of air and exercise was on the little boy's 
delicate face, and his father's nose had already 
had a sunstroke [Why will Phoebus insist on 
assailing the noses of us Londoners before our 
cheeks ?] such as is incidental to sudden exposure. 
It was plainly to be gathered from the wideawake, 
the loose jacket, and the incipient moustache, that 
Paterfamilias was out for a month's holiday ; but I 
was concerned to see, soon afterwards, that the 
month's holiday had like to be brought to a 
premature close by his injudicious temerity in 
attempting to climb a rocky ascent by an insecure 
route, the surface of which, when midway to the 
summit, crumbled beneath his feet, and well nigh 
precipitated him to the bottom. These are among 
the common incidents of the first days' holidays ; 
we gain experience and caution as we advance. 

I should have been minded, if time and space 
had permitted, to lay down in this place some 
rules for holiday-makers ; but the circumstances 
and conditions are so various that it would take 



VARIOUS CONDITIONS. 23 

rather a small volume than the page or two at my 
disposal to legislate for such numerous diversities. 
To one man the best conditions of a holiday 
are solitary travelling and perfect independence ; 
another is fain to take with him wife and children, 
and all belongings ; a third affects the companion- 
ship of a comrade or two, masculine and muscular, 
who can walk as many miles, smoke as many 
cigars, and drink as much Bass as himself. Jones 
takes a moor in Scotland : Johnson a preserve in 
Norfolk ; Brown goes with Mrs. Brown and the 
little Browns to Scarborough ; Robinson is off by 
himself into Wales, with a sketch-book in his 
pocket ; and Jenkins departs with his young wife 
to the Rhineland, happy as a king. Much depends 
upon age, on health, on the bondage of our daily 
habits. Some eschew the " strenuous idleness " of 
holiday-making, and let the holiday take quiet 
possession of them. There are those who consider 
nothing so enjoyable as to spend a day in slippers, 
in their wonted homes, turning over their books, 
reading old letters and papers, sauntering into the 
garden, wondering at the flowers, nibbling at the 
fruit — an short, resting thoroughly from labour, and 
never thinking w T hat the next hour or the next day 



24 HOLIDA VS. . 

is to produce. For my own part, I well, no 

matter ; some holidays are better than others, but 
all holidays are good. 

I have had some grievous failures in my day — 
who has not ? But I am not in the least dis- 
couraged by them. I went out for a walking tour 
in the Home Counties, and spent ten days looking 
out of the windows of bad hotels in fourth-rate 
towns, gazing at the inexhaustible rain. I shall 
never forget my visit to Llangollen, and the 
weather by which it was celebrated. I journeyed 
to the venerable cathedral-town of Salisbury, on 
a pilgrimage to my old school-house, and found an 
insignificant row of ten-pound cottages on its site. 
It was a sore disappointment to me, but there are 
always compensations. The march of time had 
not taken away the playing-field, in which we 
fought out desperate cricket-matches with the 
Town, recruited commonly with some of the best 
blood of the county. Nor had it taken away 
Keynes's nursery-gardens, now of world-wide repu- 
tation for their triumphs at rose-shows, nor the 
eternal " rings" of old Sarum, with their chalk 
and flint, their grassy banks, their yew-trees and 
snakes. Very pleasant to re-visit these old haunts, 



FAILURES AND MISCHANCES. 25 

but I would have given much, after long years spent 
on alien soil, again to traverse those old school- 
rooms and eating- halls and dormitories, where I 
wrote bad verses, and ate good beef, and slept 
soundly in my boyhood. My experiences are 
replete with mischances of this kind. Every holi- 
day-maker must be prepared for them. What 
matter ? They are very disappointing whilst they 
last ; but we have our holidays all the same. 
When bad weather sets steadily in, we are wont to 
say that we might as well have stayed at home ; 
but we are ignorant and ungrateful when we say 
so. For in truth, abstinence from work, liberation 
from the ordinary environments of daily life, fami- 
liarity with new sights and sounds, and the admis- 
sion of new trains of thought, all confer upon us 
the benefits of a holiday, though the immediate 
enjoyment may be scant. We are better for it 
when we return. We may not be conscious of the 
gain, but it is no less certain. It finds us out 
years afterwards, and for every day of relaxa- 
tion, gives us another week or another month of 
work. Is there nothing in that, my friends ? I 
have seen the strongest frames suddenly shattered 
— the brightest intellects suddenly dimmed. And 



26 HO LID A VS. 

why ? We know that God " rested " after His work ; 
and shall human weakness dare to do without it ? 
It is said to be a great and noble thing — 

" To scorn delights and live laborious days." 

But the line, despite its paternity, is altogether the 
greatest braggart and impostor that I know. If 
we would live laborious days, we must not scorn 
delights. It is by taking a full measure of — 

" Delight in little things — 
The buoyant child surviving in the man, " 

that we are enabled to do our appointed work. 
Let us all hold fast to this. Let us have our 
harmless delights ; let us have our rest ; let us 
have our holidays. 

Yes : here is dear old August come upon us, 
with its ripe harvests and its riper holidays ; and 
let us welcome it with grateful hearts. You and I, 
dear reader, let us hope, have done seven months' 
good work this year ; and shall we not be prepared 
to do some more good work, by-and-by, when we 
have played a little ? 

It is time now r to be packing up. Think well 
about this matter, my friends. Don't start in a 
hurry. Leave no neglected duties behind to stare 
at you, with grim spectral aspects, at odd quiet 



CONSIDERATION FOR OTHERS. 27 

times, when there is a lull in the excitement of 
travel. Many a holiday has been spoilt by dis- 
turbing recollections of something that ought to 
have been done or provided for before the hour of 
departure. A day or two may be well spent, 
therefore, in quiet thoughtful preparation at home. 
Take your time about it, and go calmly. If you 
leave everything to the last moment and start in 
a fluster, your folly will be sure to find you out. 

I have further matter of discourse ; but I must 
lay down the pen, hopeful, however, that I may be 
heard again upon this or some cognate subject. 
My last word of advice to holiday-makers is, that 
they should never fail to remember that it is more 
blessed to give than to receive. If they would 
enjoy their own holidays thoroughly, and without 
any prickings of conscience, they must carry with 
them the pleasant reflection that, to the best of 
their ability, they have dispensed, and are prepared 
to dispense, the same blessed privilege to others. 
There are few of us, great or small, who have not 
in some measure the power of emancipating others. 
The little mouse in the fable, it will be remembered, 
released the great lion of the forest. The master is 
scarcely less dependent upon the servant for his 



28 



HO LI DA VS. 



holiday than the servant is upon the master. Let 
us all bear this in mind, and all help one another. 
A good, healthy feeling of this kind will do much 
to bridge over the awful chasm that yawns between 
the rich and the poor. Let us, then, encourage it 
to the utmost. This is the best advice an old 
fellow can give ; and with it he may well close, 
reverentially, his plea for Holidays. 

[August, i860.] 




( 2 9 ) 



W R K. 




AVING lately discoursed upon Holidays, and, 
as I have been pleased to find, with good 
acceptance from some indulgent friends, I 
am minded, now that November has come round 
upon us, to take WORK for my theme. Less alluring 
the present topic may be than its predecessor, but 
some delights may be gathered from it by those who 
seek them wisely ; and there are few of us whom 
it does not concern. For, as I said of old, in other 
words, regard it properly, and Work is the sub- 
strate, or basis, of all our daily blessings, upon 
which lesser joys of divers kinds are built up by 
the Great Architect and Disposer ; and without 
which there may be brief spasms and convulsions 
of excitement, which we may call pleasure, but no 
continuous happiness or content 

Wherefore, thank God, praise God, O my 
friends — ye who are born to work, and have work 



30 WORK. 

to do. There are few of us who may not find it 
when they will, and for those few we may weep 
tears of compassion. Not on those who deceive 
themselves and w r ould deceive others into the 
belief, that they cannot find work to do, because, 
misguided by a false sense of the true dignity of 
life and a false measure of their own capacity- 
silly worldlings who would drive the coursers of 
the Sun — they strive to soar aloft, when nature has 
granted to them only to creep ; — not on such vain 
tumours is our pity to be wasted. If they would 
consent to creep, they might creep nobly. All 
honest labour, be it the merest hand-work, brain- 
less and mechanical drudgery, dignifies human life. 
Better is it to break stones or to turn a mangle 
than to do nothing. Good roads and clean linen 
are products of human industry which we need not 
be ashamed of having- a hand in creating. Let us 
do the best we can ! If it be not permitted to us 
to do work of one kind, let us brace ourselves up 
for work of another. And to all of the great guild 
or brotherhood of workmen let us hold out a hand 
— a hand of assistance, if need be ; anyhow, a hand 
of fellowship. If the w T ork be of much account in 
the world's eye, let us be thankful ; if of little, let 



TRUE DIGNITY OF LABOUR, 31 

us be content. " All service ranks the same with 
God." — Let us rejoice that we are permitted to 
serve, whether at the council-board of the nation, 
at the head of a regiment of horse, or only behind 
a counter. 

This is not novel doctrine ; yet it needs to be 
enforced at odd times, lest the truth of it should 
pass out of remembrance. Even as I write, a 
newspaper lies before me, in which there is a 
passage headed " Romantic Suicide," which relates 
how " A fine young man, named Arsene, lately 
hanged himself in his master's house, near Paris." 
His only quarrel with the world was that cruel fate 
had condemned him to be a grocer. He left behind 
him a memorandum, bewailing his hard lot, and 
beseeching his parents "to erect a simple tomb- 
stone to his memory, and to inscribe upon it these 
words — ' Born to be a man ; died a grocer.' " Now, 
the plain truth is that he was not born to be a 
man ; if he had been, he would have lived a grocer. 
The manliest thing that I know in this world is to 1 
do your duty in that state of life to which it has 
pleased God to call you ; and if you have been 
called to grocery, why not ? There are many call- 
ings without which the world could do better than 



32 WORK. 

without grocers. Strive then to be a good grocer, 
A good grocer is any day better than a bad poet. 
This silly Arsene, who hanged himself, wrote :— " I 
remember to have read somewhere that a man 
should apply his intelligence to be useful to 
humanity, and as I see I shall never be fit for 
anything but to weigh cheese and dried plums, I 
have made up my mind to go to another w r orld, 
which I have heard of, and see whether there may 
not be a place for me there." A place, doubtless ; 
according to the faith of the silly grocerling, a 
" Purgatory of Suicides," in w r hich he will be con- 
demned to ceaseless plum-weighings, and out of 
which he will in no wise be suffered to escape, until 
he has subdued his soul to a right sense of the 
dignity of plum-weighing as an appointed duty, 
and of the utility of the calling to the w r orld. 
" Useful to humanity ! " O Arsene ! who is not 
useful, if you are not, Monsieur L'Epicier ? On my 
honour as a gentleman, I could no more write 
these lines, but for the early cup of coffee where- 
with I am refreshing myself in the quiet of the 
morning ere the house is astir, than I could pen 
another Iliad. And what if, my toilet accom- 
plished, I were to descend to the breakfast-room 



OUR DAILY WANTS. 33 

and find there no tea, and no sugar — what of my 
equanimity for the rest of the day ? Is it any- 
thing to me in this remote country town, in the 
neighbourhood of which I am sojourning for awhile, 
that there are wise men and erudite scholars in the 
vicinity. I do not ask, and I do not care. If 
Solon were to be my next-door neighbour, or 
Socrates my fellow-lodger, what better should I be 
for the proximity of all their sapience ? But it is 
everything to me that there is a good grocer in the 
High Street — that my daily wants, though they be 
not many, and plums are not my especial frailty, 
are adequately supplied. " Not useful to humanity ? " 
I should like to know who are useful to humanity, 
if the grocer who keeps the shop in this little town, 
the assistant who weighs out the groceries, and the 
errand-boy who carries them to their several desti- 
nations, are not useful. Think of the panic in 
Castleton this morning if there were to be a gap 
in High Street, and "Figs — No. 9," with all his 
establishment and his stock-in-trade, were suddenly 
to be missing ; we should then know how useful he 
has been to us all. 

It is, doubtless, in the remembrance of many, 
that among other wise things to be found in 

3 



34 WORK. 

Mr. John Bunyan's popular volume is a description 
of Vain-Hope, the ferryman, who ferried Ignorance 
across the river. In a little doctrinal note, Mr. ♦ 
Bunyan sagaciously observes : " Vain-Hope ever 
dwells in the bosom of fools, and is ever ready 
to assist Ignorance." Now, what is here said in a 
spiritual sense, is true also in worldly matters. 
Vain-hope is ever ready, with the oar in his 
hand, to ferry Ignorance across the river of life. 
And what shoals they encounter on the passage ! 
in what depths of mud they flounder on the banks ! 
It has always been so more or less ; but it appears 
to me sometimes that this is an especial vice and 
danger of the age. We are, somehow or other, all 
of us waxing proud, and getting above our work ; 
and what is to become of generations beyond us, 
if we go on at this rate, it is impossible to conjec- 
ture. What is most wanted is a strong ebb-tide to 
send us back again to the status of our grandsires, 
and to give us more lowly thoughts. Young men 
in these times think that they have " a soul beyond 
the shop ; " and old men, I am afraid, are too prone 
to encourage the mischievous idea, and to turn 
their sons, who might be good tradesmen, into 
indifferent members of some " gentlemanly profes- 



STOOPING TO COX OVER. 35 

sion." But the gentlemanly professions are now 
becoming so crowded and overstocked, and the 
difficulty of earning bare subsistence in them so 
increasingly great, that men of family and educa- 
tion are beginning to think whether they may not 
advantageously pick up for their sons the grocer's 
apron which young Figs has scornfully thrown 
aside, or the yard measure which Bombazine junior 
has broken across his knee.* I know some who 
would have done wisely had they thus stooped to 
conquer the great problem of the labour of life — 
who, vainly looking for " gentlemanly " employ- 
ment for their children, and scorning meaner but 
honourable work, which would have profitably 
occupied their time and elevated their character, 
as a sense of honest work and manly independence 
ever must elevate it — have suffered them to hang 
about billiard-rooms and stable-yards, until the 
young " gentlemen " have developed into some- 
thing not much better than blacklegs and sharpers. 
Paterfamilias ! Paterfamilias ! think of this before 



* Since this was written, ten years ago, trie good sense "of the 
upper classes of English society, of the early developments of which 
I have here spoken, has more signally asserted itself. I have spoken 
incidentally of this in the essay on Toleration. (1S70.) 



36 WORK. 

'tis too late. When you and I were little boys, 
our mothers were not too learned to recite to us 
the versicles of good Doctor Watts. They were of 
a good homely, lasting quality, like our puerile 
corduroys ; and as Christian Years and Proverbial 
Philosophies were not in those days, we were 
content w T ith both the poetry and the morality of 
the doctor's lyrics. Neither you nor I can remem- 
ber the best passages in Tennyson's charming 
Idylls, delightedly as we read them last year. But 
our memory still clings, with grateful and affec- 
tionate tenacity, to the doctrine-freighted numbers 
which we lisped on the maternal knee. Many 
were the impressive truths which we learnt in those 
days — truths often rendered doubly imposing to 
our dawning intelligence, by the striking facts in 
natural history (from bears and tigers down to busy- 
bees), wherewith the poetical divine was wont to 
illustrate his metrical precepts ; but none more 
firmly implanted in our minds than the fact that — 

" Satan finds some mischief still 
For idle hands to do." 

" Give your son a Bible and a calling," said 
another eminent divine. Write the words in letters 
of gold ! Any calling is better than none : there 



HIGH AND LOW. 37 

is nothing surer than that. You would like to se 
your Harry fairly started for the Woolsack ; your 
little Cecil steaming up to the other bank of the 
great river where lies the archiepiscopal palace of 
Lambeth ; and your blue-eyed Ernest floating 
calmly into the viceregal precincts of the Govern- 
ment House at Calcutta. Well ; I have my Harry, 
and my Cecil, and my Ernest ; and I should like 
to see them, too, well ahead in the race for the 
Chancellor's wig, or the Primate's sleeves, or the 
portfolio of the Governor-General ; but I would 
sooner see them cutting planks in a saw-yard, or 
shouldering heavy luggage at a railway-station, 
than doing nothing, when they have come to a 
fitting age to do a good day's work for a good 
day's wage, and to earn their bread like honest 
gentlemen. 

There is nothing like it in human life — nothing 
at the same time so ennobling and so exhilarating. 
It braces a man like cold water : it invigorates him 
like iron and quinine. What a poor creature he is 
who has no work to do — what a burden to himself 
and to others ! Many a man's happiness has been 
blasted by the possession of an estate, and, if 
independence without work be a sore trouble, what 



38 WORK. 

must idleness be without independence ! For a 
thoroughly idle man, you must not look in the 
high places of the earth. Your great lords and 
landed proprietors have commonly work to do. 
The management of a great estate, in spite of all 
intermediate agency of lawyers, and stewards, and 
bailiffs, is no light matter to the owner, whatever 
we, who have neither lands, nor houses, nor fat 
beeves, and live from hand to mouth by hard 
brain- work, may think upon the subject, My Lord 
Duke disappears into his sanctum, like meaner 
men, every morning after breakfast, when you 
think that he might be playing billiards, or shooting 
pheasants, or riding to the hounds. He is as much 
encumbered with his riches, as we are with our 
poverty. Of both lots hard work is the condition, 
Moreover, it is no small thing to be a legislator, 
whether by birthright or by election. Our laws 
are made, and our Public Service is presided over, 
by men of large estate, whether for the national 
good I know not, but assuredly for their own. And 
indeed, when I come to think of the immense 
amount of harm that might be done by the 
thousand powerful noblemen and gentlemen, whom 
our two Houses of Parliament gather up and 



LABOURS OF THE RICH. 39 

absorb into the mass of labouring men, if they 
were left all the year round to their own devices, I 
can almost forgive the legislative errors and the 
administrative miscarriages to which they are prone. 
What mischief would Satan find for the idle hands 
of men with so much money in their pockets. Talk 
of wasted sessions, of unprofitable debates, of 
mighty deluges of words leading to nothing, and 
hint that Parliament is of no use ! Of no use ! Is 
there any industrial school in the whole kingdom 
of half so much use ? any reformatory so potential 
for good ? Surely an institution for keeping our 
great lords and landed gentry out of mischief, is 
not to be made light of by any benevolent mind. 

Large estates, in this sense, may be great bless- 
ings, as supplying work to the possessors ; but 
small estates are commonly our bane. It is among 
the middle classes — the upper ranks of the middle 
classes — that men without work are mostly to be 
found. Say that a man is born to the possession 
of, or that in mature age he inherits, an income of 
2,000/. a year. You wish yourself that man. Well, 
I must confess my weakness ; I have wished it 
scores of times myself. Cui bono ? Though a 
goodly sum to earn, it is not much to spend — but 



4o WORK. 

it is sufficient to invite idleness. The daily bread 
being found, there is no necessity to toil for it ; so 
we eschew work if we are young, and we renounce 
work if we are old ; and we live upon our property, 
gentlemen at ease. " At ease ! " It seems to be 
an easy life to live upon a property that manages 
itself, and to have nothing to do but to spend your 
few modest thousands. Ah ! but I have known 
men who have found it a very hard life ; men who 
have envied the bricklayer as he built up anew the 
chimney blown down by the September wind, or 
repaired the lights of the greenhouse broken by the 
last night's hail ; men, who have looked wistfully 
at the mortar and the putty, and longed for a job 
of work, on a larger and a manlier scale than their 
principal daily occupation of mending theirchildren's 
toys. Well, it is better to have a glue-pot simmer- 
ing at your study fire, than to have no implement 
of work within your reach. But who can doubt 
that the bricklayer and the glazier are happier than 
the " man of property " for whom they are doing 
those humble strokes of work ? Better that he had 
been articled to his uncle the lawyer, or that his 
money were invested in some laborious and anxious 
business that would occupy his time and his 



IN SICKNESS AND TN HEALTH. 41 

thoughts ; better anything that would give him 
a calling, than that he should dawdle out life as 
" a gentleman at large," so called Ulcus a 11011 lucendo, 
because he lives in the narrowest possible circle of 
life, and has not a single enlarged idea to bless him. 
There are some who may accept these praises 
of work only in a qualified or conditional sense. 
Under all circumstances of health or sickness, joy 
or sorrow, to be compelled to work is often said to 
be a grievous necessity, and many kind souls are 
moved to compassion by the thought of it. But 
there is a vis medicatrix in work as there is in 
nothing else ; and most people owe more to it than 
they acknowledge, or even suspect. To me, it has 
always appeared to be the hardest necessity of all 
to work, when good health, and elastic spirits, and 
a general buoyancy of one's whole being, perpetu- 
ally suggests play. Let us be up and about ! The 
sun shines. The sky is clear. All nature is jocund. 
The tingling life within us prompts us to active 
movement, and we are eager to disport ourselves in 
the air. We would ride or walk — play at cricket — 
shoot — fish — pull an oar on the river — anything 
that will give freedom to our limbs and freshness 
to our cheeks. But, the work must be done. Oh, 



42 WORK. 

my friends, then it is that the necessity is truly 
grievous, then it is that the struggle between incli- 
nation and duty rends the very soul of the work- 
man. It is a terrible conflict, demanding all the 
courage and resistance of a strong man to lead him 
along the path of victory. I assume that the work 
is work that ought to be done, and cannot without 
injury be delayed ; else, these external invitations 
being but few in our ungenial climate, I might 
almost admit the wisdom of yielding to them. 
Does not God give us fine days that we, as well 
as the flowers and the harvest, may sun ourselves 
in them ? Are light, and air, and heaven's warmth, 
only for the nurslings of the field and the garden ? 
Are they not also for us, cradled inheritors of the 
world's common blessings ? Truly, such obstinate 
questionings as these, when work would hold us 
down with an iron hand, are among our sorest 
temptations. It is hard to be chained to the desk — 
cabined, cribbed, confined within four dreary walls 
— when our hearts are throbbing and our limbs are 
twitching with desire to go far a-field, and to " eat 
the air," as they phrase it in the emphatic language 
of the East. Sound health and buoyant spirits 
and the yearning after out-of-doors recreation 



AN ANECDOTE TO SICKLY FANCIES. 43 

which they induce, are the real aggravations of 
work, the disturbing influences which make us 
sometimes deplore that we are workmen. 

But sickness and sorrow — how should we bear 
them, but for the work which we have to do ? 
Writing of sickness, I shall not be understood to 
have in mind those mortal ailments which prostrate 
body and soul, and render work an impossibility, but 
of the lesser infirmities of our nature. There are 
few* really sound men amongst us. Sickness, in its 
less subduing form, is the common lot of us poor 
worldlings. But it is tolerable or intolerable just 
as we concern ourselves little or much about it. If 
we really knew the processes of derangement and 
decay which are going on within us — if we could 
see all the several parts of our mortal machinery, 
and the disorders, organic or functional, which are 
impeding its right action, verily the lives of many 
of us would be a long night of suffering and terror. 
There are pangs, and spasms, and tremors, and 
faintnesses, greater or less, afflicting us all day 
long. They all indicate some internal disorganiza- 
tion or disturbance ; and if we have nothing to do 
but to dwell upon them — if w r e are continually 
asking ourselves w T hat they mean — we soon shrivel 



44 WORK. 

into invalids, and become what we think ourselves. 
A busy man takes no heed of these slight prompt- 
ings of infirmity. He tells you, perhaps, when you 
ask him how he is, that he really does not know — 
that he has had no time to consider. So much, 
indeed, has the mind to do with our merely 
physical sensations, that many a man will bear 
witness to the fact, that when some good-natured 
friend has told him that he "is not looking well/' 
he has begun at once to be conscious of some 
disturbance of the system of which he had had 
no knowledge before. I have heard men, too, 
contend against the expediency of holidays, on 
the ground that they never feel as well during 
the vacation as when they are actively at w r ork. 
I do not deny the fact ; but I altogether dispute 
the inference. It does not follow that because we 
are more conscious of our infirmities at such times, 
that therefore the cessation of labour is not profit- 
able both to body and mind. Besides, who knows 
that the very sensations which oppress us at such 
seasons are not so many indications of a restorative 
process going on within us ? Irritability is often a 
sign of a salutary reaction. Nature handles us 
a little roughly when she is setting us right. 



A COAT OF MAIL. 45 

And, only with a slight variation of phraseology, 
all this might truthfully be said with respect to 
moral ailments and disturbances. As with the 
body, so with the mind. We take no account 
of small troubles when we have much strenuous 
work in hand ; and even great trials are softened 
down to us by an absorbing occupation. Whether, 
rightly considered, this, so far as the greater trials 
are concerned, be on the whole good for us, may- 
be open to doubt. 

" He who lacks time to mourn, lacks time to mend. 
Eternity mourns that : 'tis a bad cure 
For life's worst ills to have no time to feel them." * 

This may be the higher philosophy. But, after all, 
we suffer more in the course of our lives from 
small troubles and disturbances, which do us no 
good, than from the fiery trials which purify the 
soul. Against such lesser or imaginary grievances 
Work is verily a coat of mail ; and I am not sure 
that because it gives us strength to bear more 
grievous afflictions, it therefore deprives them of 
their salutary, chastening effects. 

I know that there is such a thing as being 
" kept up by excitement." We do not know how 

* Henry Taylor. 



46 WORK. 

we have torn and blistered our feet, till the toil- 
some journey is ended, and we unloose the latchets 
of our shoes. There is a familiar story of a veteran 
cab-horse, that lived day and night in harness, 
because it had an awkward habit of dropping on 
its knees as the shafts were removed. There are 
men amongst us who live ever between the shafts, 
harnessed and braced up literally within an inch 
-of their lives. Take them out of harness, and they 
drop. This is not a state of things to be tolerated, 
much less to be advocated. Very different are 
the conditions of healthy labour. There is no healthy 
labour without periods of rest. The insensibility 
to small troubles, which is a result of salutary 
work, is very different from the obliviousness of 
overwrought excitement. 

It was once, I believe, a popular theory that 
men who work hard grow prematurely old and die 
before their time. But whatsoever the wont may 
have been when it was the custom of our fore- 
fathers to sustain hard work by hard drinking, I 
believe that, in this more temperate age, idle men 
run to seed more rapidly than their more laborious 
contemporaries. Such, at least, is my observation 
of life. With a keen perception of the different 



PHYSICAL EFFECTS OF IDLENESS. 47 

results wrought upon the physique of men by different 
conditions of life, I still do not find it easy to 
describe these distinctive differences. I think, 
however, it may be said generally, that idle men 
acquire, as they advance in years, a flabby appear- 
ance, more indicative of age than the strong lines 
and the general aspect of tension, which we see in 
those who have lived laborious days. There are 
men "who rot themselves at ease on Lethe's 
wharf," whilst their toiling and striving brethren 
are full of sap and vigour. This, at least, I know, 
that commerce with lofty themes, whilst it elevates 
the mind, gives freshness and juvenility to the 
countenance and buoyancy to the whole de- 
meanour. All work does not involve such com- 
merce ; but the thoughts which arise out of the 
humblest calling — of honest work honestly done — 
are nobler than those which are associated only 
with our personal wants and our personal cares. 
And though the higher class of work be rare, it is 
still not to be omitted from such an essay as this, 
that some of the busiest men whom I know, 
personally or by fame — the men who have worked 
hardest and done most — who have found life to be 
a battle, and have fought it the most strenuously, are 



48 WORK. 

younger in their appearance, in their manner, and 
in their feelings, than their contemporaries who 
have done nothing all their lives. I never doubt 
when I see such men, that they have had wisdom 
to appreciate the small beatitudes of life ; that 
they have taken their holidays in due season ; and 
never suffered it to pass out of their remembrance 
that there is a time to work and a time to play.* 
Half a century ago, as I have said, the pillar of 
statesmanship was the bottle. As the poor cast- 
away says, alas ! even in these days, " there could 
be no bearing such a life but for the drink." Our 
great men drank, and they played, too ; but the play 
was hazard, and the play-room a stifling gambling- 
house, for which no milder name could be found 
than that which signifies the unquenchable fire of 
the doomed. But now-a-days, hard work in high 
places is ever suggestive of the wisdom of prac- 
tically recognizing the advantage of occasional 

* Some may, perhaps, here remind me of the well-known mot of 
Sir George Cornewall Lewis, who said that ' ' Life would be endurable, 
but for its pleasures." — In the sense in which he used the last word, 
there may have been truth in the saying. He was a hard and steady 
workman, alternating politics and literature in his daily life ; but he 
died early, for he neither played nor rested — and ' ' The pity of it — 
oh ! the pity of it ! " Our generation has not seen many such men. 
-(1870). 



INTERLUDES. 49 

interludes of pleasure. These are the harmless 
stimulants which keep men fresh and young, gay 
and joyous, even with the cares of a nation on 
their shoulders. Ay, these interludes ! They are 
the making of us all. What a word it is. Liidus 
inter laborem. Play between work. We do not 
all like the same games. You may choose rounders, 
perhaps ; and I may vote for prisoner's base. I 
saw a game at the latter, the other day, on a 
smooth grassy bit of table-land among rocks on 
the Welsh coast, which took five-and-thirty years off 
my life, as with keenest interest I watched the 
conflict. I don't care what it is. I am catholic in 
my sympathies. I have not been to the Derby 
since Bay Middleton's year ; I did not quite see 
the glorious fight which lately agitated all the great 
wide world in which the English language is 
spoken — though I confess that I was within an 
inch of it. But I am pleased when I hear that 
there are bets on the u double event" of a noble 
lord winning " the blue riband of the Turf" and 
gaining a decisive parliamentary majority in 
the same week ; and I did not think much the 
worse of those legislators who were said to have 
taken the train to Farnham on that memorable 

4 



5o WORK, 

April morning, though, doubtless, it is their busi- 
ness to make laws, and not to break them. 

It may be observed, too, of men of this class, 
who work hard and wear well, that they are com- 
monly fond of society, and not altogether indifferent 
to the pleasures of the table. And why not ? A 
man is not bound to be an anchorite or an ascetic 
because he has work to do. To be saturated and 
soddened, as in old times, with port or any other 
wine, is a horrible state of existence ; but are we 
therefore to have no more cakes and ale ? Men 
cannot work, any more than animals, on spare 
diet. If you have a laborious occupation, whether 
it be bodily or mental, you must live well. I read 
sometimes in temperance tracts of careful and 
thrifty wives, who have persuaded their husbands 
out of beer, and have bought small cottages with 
the savings. I have as good a wife as any man, 
but I am convinced that the last thing in the world 
to which she would desire to lead me is the water- 
trough. There is nothing of which I have less 
doubt than that every kind of labour requires 
generous support. Some theorists have written or 
declaimed about animal food clogging or deadening 
the intellectual faculties. I do not ask you to 






REPAIRING THE WASTE. 51 

gourmandize, whether you have much or little to 
do. But you may be sure that intellectual labour 
demands good physical support even more than 
bodily work. Nature kindly tells you this. Have 
you not, I ask you, felt more hungry, after a good 
spell of work in your library, than after walking a 
dozen miles in the open air ? Should you then 
feast on a salad ? I knew a man — an enthusiast in 
art — who declared that when he was in the throes 
of a great work, he always lived on roasted apples. 
He died before his time. I suspect that the Tin- 
torettos of the present day fare better and live 
longer. Beefsteaks are better than roasted apples ; 
not that, like Fuseli, you may dream horrors, but 
that you may do your appointed work with less 
waste of human life.* 

* I remember the late Chief Baron Pollock telling me, at a 
dinner of the Royal Society Club, that when he was leader of the 
Northern Circuit he made a point of never going through a day in 
court without making a substantial luncheon. At a given time his 
steak or chop, with a pint of port, was ready for him at his lodgings 
or hotel, and if at his luncheon hour, a cause in which he was 
retained was coming on, he told his junior to occupy the court for 
a certain time, and at the end of it returned to take up the brief. 
He attributed not only his good health and his capacity for work, 
but much also of his professional success to this habit ; and he 
lived, active and laborious almost to the last, to the ripe age of 
eighty-six. He must have been almost, if not quite, an octogenarian, 



52 WORK. 

To do your work well too, and to keep your 
mind fresh, you must diligently cultivate the affec- 
tions. In the society of women and of children 
there is more refreshment than in anything in the 
world. It is bright sunshine, and clear, pure air ; 
lovely sights and pleasant sounds ; and if it cannot 
be said of it, as of nature, it " never did betray the 
heart that is its own," its betrayals are so few, that 
we need not take account of them. For my own 
part, I wonder how any one can work, who has not 
some one to love and some one to love him — 

" Some one to cast his glory on — to share 
His rapture with.' , 

Whether you have finished your great history in 
six volumes, or only filled the gaps in the squire's 
hedges, there is unspeakable solace and sustentation 
in the thought that the loving heart which has 
encouraged your labour rejoices in its completion. 
But apart from this wonderful stimulant of sym- 
pathy, there is nothing in the world that so takes a 
man out of himself and diverts his thoughts from 

when he told me this, and yet on that very day he had sat many 
hours in court before dinner, and after dinner he delivered a lecture 
before the Royal Society, with all the clearness and vivacity of a 
man in the prime of his life. — (1870). 



WOMANLY SUPPORT. 53 

the toils and cares of his daily life as the society of 
women, even though they know nothing and care 
nothing about his work. This has all been said a 
thousand times before in prose and poetry, more 
eloquently and more forcibly than I could hope to 
say it, if I desired to make the most of the fact. I 
will only, therefore, observe here that it will com- 
monly be found that men who, in spite of much 
hard work, wear their years lightly, are men who 
delight in female society, and are popular with the 
other sex. Very busy men, who can find time for 
nothing else, beyond the immediate range of their 
duties and responsibilities, are seldom too busy for 
recreation of this kind. Some of the most strenuous 
and most successful workmen of modern times have, 
I am afraid, been perilously given to intrigue. It 
is the most exciting of all amusements, and, there- 
fore, the one best suited to men whose public life 
is one of excitement Bear well in mind, all ye 
who peruse this in the midst of the pleasant and 
virtuous family circle, that I merely state the fact, 
as I believe it to be ; I do not justify or palliate 
the practice. Happy the man to whom the domus et 
placens uxor are all-sufficient. God be praised that 
there are such men, and among our brightest and 



54 WORK. 

bravest too ! We will drop the subject of dangerous 
and exciting intrigue. It is a hard world, indeed, 
if it will not admit that there may be innocent 
friendship and companionship between the two 
sexes, though the female society, which lightens 
the burden of toil and smoothes down the wrinkles 
of age, may not in all cases be that of wife and 
daughters. 

And not less necessary, than pleasant recreation 
and cheering society, is good sleep. If you are to 
work well, you must sleep well. If you are to keep 
your health and strength and youth — to carry your 
powers of work w r ith you to the last — you must 
sedulously pay court to your pillow. It will 
commonly be found that the men who carry their 
years lightly are men who possess the faculty of 
sleeping at will. If you have much work to do, 
you must not account time spent in sleep to be 
time lost. It is time gained. It is an essential 
part of the duty of the day. I had once an old 
servant, who used to say, " Well, I have done my 
work. I have cleaned up ; and now I'll get my 
sleeping done!' Sleeping was in her philosophy 
a thing to be done — not a passive state, but an 
active part of her duty. And every workman 



SLEEP. 55 

should so consider it. Let him sleep in his bed, 
if he can, at proper hours of the night ; if not, 
let him sleep at any odd time, when nature invites 
him to rest himself. If we do not play tricks with 
ourselves, if we work hard without overworking 
ourselves, sleep will rarely be coy to us. As a 
general rule, it may be said, that busy men are 
better sleepers than idlers, and that mental labour 
contributes more to sound sleep than bodily fatigue. 
I believe that only mere novices in work are kept 
awake by the thought of it. Experienced workmen 
acquire a habit of shaking off its environments 
when they will. If there be one thing in life 
for which I am profoundly thankful to the Giver of 
all good gifts, it is for the faculty of sleep. 

" I have two friends, who are with me night and day, — 
True friends and constant, ever by my side ; 
Than mother more devoted, or young bride — 
Yet when one comes, the other steals away : 
For jealous friends will no joint vigil keep ; — 
The one's great name is Work ; the other's Sleep." 

It may be thought to be a condition of good 
hearty strenuous work, that the business to be done 
should be such as suits the especial tastes and 
qualifications of the workman. It is a sorry thing 
to work against the grain ; the wrong way of the 



56 WORK. 

stuff, as housewives say ; invito, Minerva, accord- 
ing to the scholars. But there is much to be 
observed in abatement of this, whereof I shall 
speak presently ; being minded first to say that 
this evil is one which is very apt to cure or to 
neutralize itself. For men are prone, by very 
force of nature, whatsoever may be their early 
diversions, to return to the path along which 
their inclination would lead them, and it will com- 
monly be found that, in the end, they are wedded 
to the work of their choice. Sometimes, it may 
fall out, that, habit being, as saith the proverb, 
" a second nature," the workman becomes first 
reconciled to his work, and afterwards well affected 
towards it, simply by the force of habit and fami- 
liarity, and more than all by a growing competency 
to perform it with address. For seldom is it that 
we do not incline kindly towards that which we are 
conscious of being able to do readily and well. 
But the instances of the former mode of cure are, 
I esteem, more frequent : men forsaking the pro- 
fessions or trades to which they have been bound 
in youth by the will of their elders to follow others 
to which their natural tastes and appetences 
incline them. If there be truth in the proverb 



CHOICE OF WORK. 57 

that, " a rolling stone gathers no moss," it may be 
better philosophy to reconcile oneself to the un- 
loved work ; but " Man will break out, despite 
philosophy," and nature is often too strong for us. 
Whether it be more worldly wise in such cases of 
ill-assorted alliance to look the matter boldly in 
the face, to go into the Court of Divorce, and 
making great sacrifice thereby of apprentice-fees, 
and premia, and education-money, and years of 
early training and servitude, to make a fresh start 
in life, or to cling resolutely to the first uncongenial 
connexion, and work on ill-mated to the last, is a 
question which may well perplex a philosopher. 
There is no rule to be derived from experience in 
such a case ; for I have known men who have 
taken fresh starts, in mature years, make their 
way triumphantly to the goal of success, and I 
have known them too to break down, weak of limb 
and scant of breath, painfully and regretfully, on 
the way. It might, perhaps, have appeared on 
closer inspection of these varying results, that in 
the one case the workman had been moved by an 
irrepressible instinct or appetence to embrace the 
new vocation, and in the other, by the instability 
and weakness of his nature, to forsake the old. 



58 WORK. 

And it is very certain that no such change should 
be lightly made ; that we should examine ourselves 
carefully before we undertake it, and feel assured 
that it is not fickleness, or love of change, or want 
of perseverance that impels us, but a genuine 
conviction that we have within us the elements of 
success in the new way of life — that it is, in fact, 
our vocation or calling — that it calls us irresistibly, 
and that we must go. 

Besides, I would have it to be understood, as I 
before suggested, that even the unwilling Minerva 
has favours of her own to dispense— that there is 
compensation for the pains and penalties of work- 
ing against the grain. For there is surely no work 
so worthy, so ennobling, as that which is done by 
us painfully and laboriously under a strong sense 
of an abiding duty. There is a satisfaction in the 
feeling that we have done, to the best of our poor 
ability, certain work altogether foreign to our tastes 
and inclinations — that we have striven manfully 
against our natural repugnance, and done the work 
assigned to us thoroughly and well, in spite of 
every temptation to half-do it, or to leave it alto- 
gether undone. There is a satisfaction, I say, in 
such a feeling, not to be derived from the con- 



THE UNWILLING MINERVA. 59 

templation of more congenial labour ; for there is 
small merit in doing thoroughly and well what it 
pleases us to do. Work done without strife, almost, 
indeed, without labour, is but a shadow or delusion 
of work. But to see a man sustained by a sense 
of duty, working painfully and laboriously, with 
indomitable perseverance, day after day, at that 
which to him is mere drudgery and task-work, is a 
sight fit for the gods. What merit is it that I write 
these pages ? Does it not please me to write 
them ? Is not my heart in the sport ? But what, 
if I were to have spent this bright autumn day, 
adding up column after column of abhorred figures, 
solely for duty's sake, would it not be a meritorious 
performance ? Should I not have reason to stroke 
my beard approvingly, and say, " Well done, 
thou good and faithful servant ? " Moreover, the 
smaller your pleasure in doing your work, the 
greater your pleasure in having done it. Like 
Byron's Tasso, I might, in one case, my pleasant 
long-sustaining task being done, blot its final page 
with tears ; but, in the other, I should send up a 
grateful paean, shouting — " Joy, — joy for ever, my 
task is done!" like Moore's Peri, and rapturously 
asking myself whether I am not happy. 



60 WORK. 

Whether you like it or not, my friend, go at it 
cheerfully. I know some men who are always 
sighing over their work, and over work, too, of 
their own election. They think they are hardly 
used in having so much to do, and are continually 
predicting that they will break down under it. It 
is a bad sign in a workman when he falls into a 
habit of predicting failures and disasters. In the 
course of the recent investigation into the circum- 
stances of that mysterious child-murder,* which has 
struck so deep and tragic an interest into well-nigh 
every household in the country, one of the wit- 
nesses, a small farmer, was asked if he knew the 
meaning of the word " prediction." Confessing his 
ignorance, he excused himself on the ground that 
he had been at work since he was seven years old. 
He had been too busy all his life to trouble him- 
self about predictions. And I am always inclined 
to think, I hope not uncharitably, when I hear a 
man sighing over his work, and predicting that he 
will break down under it, that he really has not, 
and never has had, very much work to do. In the 
same way, idle men who really do nothing— who 

* The once notorious Road Murder — now no longer a mystery. 

-(1870). 



TIME FOR WORK. 61 

have no calling, and perhaps not even a hobby — 
are continually pleading want of time. They are 
perfectly sincere when they tell you that they have 
" no time " for anything involving intellectual 
exercise. They have come by force of habit to 
mistake strenuous idleness for work, and the day is 
dawdled out, miserably enough, before they have 
begun to take account of its hours. Busy men 
make time, whilst idle men are killing it, and 
refrain from urging a plea which, in their case, 
would be a valid one, and accepted as such almost 
before it is offered. 

It is obvious that this matter of the employment 
and distribution of time is at the very bottom of 
the whole question of Work. There are four-and- 
twenty hours in every day, and the great problem of 
their distribution is one not easily to be solved. So 
various in its conditions and requirements is Work, 
that it is impossible, in a few sentences, to lay down 
any rules relating to the time that should be appro- 
priated to, and absorbed by, it. There is hand-work 
and there is head-work ; and in many trades and 
callings the question of time is settled by Act of 
Parliament, by official regulation, or even by social 
compact. Only recently one important section of 



62 WORK. 

the working world has been agitated by a question 
of nine or ten hours of toil to the labouring man's 
days. There are some men whose work is never 
done, either because their calling is one which 
forbids limitation of hours, or because their minds 
are of so active, so restless a nature, that they 
cannot suffer themselves to lie fallow. A medical 
practitioner, for example, can never call an hour of 
the day or of the night his own. Literary men, 
too, work at all hours, early and late : there is no 
limitation to the labours of the imagination. As 
long as there is a subject to be found, there is 
work to be done. But the larger number of work- 
men go forth every day after breakfast, and return 
before dinner or before supper, spending from six 
to ten hours at their apportioned work. From ten 
to four is the ordinary work-time at the public 
offices, from nine to five at private mercantile 
establishments, and from nine to seven, or still 
later, at shops, where the work to be done is not 
of a kind to make any serious inroads upon body 
or on brain. Much has been said recently about 
the tendency of the age towards overwork. Heaven 
knows that I would protest against the age, if I 
believed that such were its tendency. Excessive 



DISTRIBUTION OF WORK. 63 

competition may generate such results. But I do 
not think that, generally speaking, we are over- 
worked. Perhaps what we want most is a little 
better distribution of our time. If I had the 
management of any number of men and women, 
and the disposal of their time, I would rather give 
them an extra hour's work every day, so as to 
afford them a half-holiday in the week, and a week 
or two's holiday in every year, than that they 
should go without their holidays. I am convinced 
that I should find, on the 31st of December, that I 
had gained some good work and that they had 
gained some good health by the arrangement. 

About the hour of the day at which head-work 
can most profitably be done there are varying 
opinions. The more common voice would seem to 
incline towards the dictum that " the morning is 
the best time for work," but I am not disposed to 
accept this as a general proposition. I speak, of 
course, of volunteer work, which is bound by no 
especial laws. The ordinary affairs of life must be 
transacted in business hours, according to the 
official chronologies of which I have spoken above ; 
but I cannot help thinking that the work which 
makes the most noise in the world is not done in 



64 WORK. 

office-hours. Continual interruptions at that time 
make sustained head-work difficult, if not impos- 
sible. There are few men occupying an important 
position in an " office," public or private, who do 
not carry their work home with them, and perform 
that part of it which demands the most thought 
in the quietude of their own studies. Others do 
supplementary work, write books or articles, or 
solve mighty problems in science. Others again, 
having no official labours, choose their own time 
for literary labour or scientific research. To all of 
these, it must often have been a question, whether 
it is better to work early or late. I have said that 
the general verdict is in favour of the former ; and 
on the whole, I think rightly. If a man is blest 
with a regular occupation, demanding the mid-day 
period, he is necessitated to take his principal meal 
in the evening. If he works out of office-hours, he 
must work before breakfast or after dinner. To 
work after dinner, he must work late, by candle- 
light, at a time when he ought to be setting bed- 
wards. Young men may do this, but few men 
past forty can work after dinner. If you can work 
at all at night, one hour at that time may be 
worth any two in the morning. The house is 



NIGHT-WORK. 65 

hushed, the brain is clear, the distracting influences 
of the day are at an end. You have not to disturb 
yourself with thoughts of what you are about to 
do, or what you are about to suffer. You know 
that there is a gulf between you and the affairs of 
the outside world, almost like the chasm of death ; 
and that you need not take thought of the morrow 
until the morrow has come. I have heard it said 
that there are few really great thoughts, such as 
the world will not willingly let die, that have not 
been conceived under the quiet stars. It may be 
so. But it can be only mere assumption or con- 
jecture. We do not know at what hour Bacon 
wrote his best-remembered works, or Shakspeare, 
or Locke. In those old pre-gaseous days, men 
rose early and set late. Still, we have from classic 
ages frequent references to the wasting of the mid- 
night oil ; and we know that many recent writers 
have toiled into the small hours, after midnight, 
and thus produced the most brilliant and enduring 
children of their brains. 

Why, then, do I speak in praise of morning 
work ? It has its inevitable drawbacks. That the 
brain is clearer then than at other times is the 
merest theory, propounded by those who have not 

5 



66 WORK. 

worked early or late. It is a time, too, of expecta- 
tion : you feel that you are drifting into the cares and 
anxieties of the day, and it is difficult to distract 
your mind from what is to come. Moreover, the 
before-breakfast period must always be brought to 
an abrupt close. With the inevitable eight o'clock 
come the postman and the hot-water ; and the 
disturbing business of the day has commenced. 
But at night you only drift into deeper silence and 
quicker inspiration. If the right mood is upon 
you, you write on ; if not, your pillow awaits you. 
Why, then, I say, do I write in favour of early 
work ? Partly, because after-dinner labour is often 
physically impossible, and, when possible, some- 
times detrimental ; and, partly, because few men 
can call their evenings their own. The claims of 
society and of the family circle are not to be 
resisted. The evening hours are the social hours, 
and it is right that we should devote them to 
intercourse with our fellows. But we can always 
rely upon our mornings. Nobody disputes with 
us the possession of them. And if we cannot do 
so much as at night, we are sure of being able to 
do something. For steady continuous work com- 
mend me to these morning-hours. Spasmodic utter- 



MORNING-WORK. 67 

ances of genius may scintillate best, like fireworks, 
in the darkness of the night ; but the morning is 
the time for laborious investigation — for all that is 
rightly to be called work. And if there were 
nothing else in favour of morning studies, there 
would be the paramount consideration that early 
hours are assuredly conducive to health, and, 
therefore, to the power of sustained application. 
The old couplet, learnt by all of us in the 
nursery, — 

1 ' Early to bed and early to rise 
Makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise," 

may not be strictly true, in a positive sense, else 
I should be rich instead of poor at this time, and 
wise instead of foolish ; but in a comparative sense 
it may be, and, indeed, I feel it is — for I should, 
doubtless, have been poorer and a greater fool if 
I had not been an early riser and an early worker. 
And as to health, can any one doubt the difference 
between the night-work and the morning-work ? 
I speak alike of health of body and health of 
mind. There is not in the morning-work that 
unnatural excitement of the brain (too often aided 
by stimulants) which attends night-work ; and I 
am sure that no one who has tried the former will 



68 WORK. 

be slow to admit the infinite refreshment of those 
early hours, in the summer-time, before the sun is 
high in the heavens and the heats of the day have 
come upon us. Even in the winter, there is nothing 
that is not, under due arrangement, cheerful in the 
morning-hours. In a few minutes, the gas may be 
all a-blaze, and the fire may be bright on the 
hearth, and the water may be boiling, in an 
" setna," for the early tea or coffee that is to start 
us on our morning's work. But I need not add 
that early setting bedwards must precede this. We 
must lay our heads upon our pillows an hour or 
two before midnight, if we expect on rising to 
have before us — 

" The morning freshness and the welcome work, 
The aims, the objects, and the interests, 
Which make earth heaven, and man almost a God," 

And the place of our daily work is not less 
important than the time. There are few, perhaps, 
who can select their own workshops ; but those, 
who can, I would strongly recommend to choose a 
room in country or the suburbs, opening into a 
garden, or, next thing to it, commanding a view of 
trees or grass-land, pleasant and refreshing to the 
sight. It is no small thing to be able to lay down 



ODDS AND ENDS. 69 

the pen for a few minutes, and to take a rush or 
saunter in the garden, breathing the fresh air and 
inhaling the perfume of the flowers ;* and it is 
good alike for the eye and the brain to look up from 
one's books and one's papers, to gaze abroad, even 
in London, on the beautiful foliage which may be 
seen there, in summer and autumn, in the parks or 
in the great squares, such as Lincoln's Inn Fields. 

A great deal of work may be done in little 
odd chinks and crevices of time — spare half-hours, 
of which many men take no account. I have not 
much faith in the story of the gentleman who 
wrote a great work on Jurisprudence at odd times, 
while he was waiting for his wife to go out with 
him. Jurisprudence is not exactly the subject to 
be treated of by snatches in this way. But much 
useful work, nevertheless, may come out of these 
little odds and ends, which we are wont to throw 
idly away. There are few who have not desultory 
work for desultory hours. Letters may be written, 
which otherwise would obtrude themselves upon us, 

* Lord Macaulay told me that he had derived great benefit from 
his removal from the Albany to Campden Hill, where the library, 
in which he wrote, opened into a pleasant garden. It appeared to 
me to be the ne plus ultra of a literary workshop, and I have 
endeavoured to imitate it on a very humble scale. 



70 WORK. 

and break in upon our sustained labour. Notes 
may be made. Papers may be arranged. I know 
a man who devotes these fragments of time to the 
correction of the press, and is seldom without a 
proof-sheet in his pocket. At all sorts of odd 
moments the pencil and the proof are produced : at 
railway-stations, waiting for the train ; at hotels, 
waiting for dinner ; on the deck of a steamer ; in 
the waiting-room of a Minister ; in all kinds of 
places, and in all possible circumstances, you may 
see him with a proof in his hand. It is a wise 
thing, too, to carry about a note-book in one's 
pocket. Every public writer knows that he loses 
many of his best ideas, because they sprout up, 
unannounced and unexpected, at strange times, 
and are not stereotyped on the memory. He 
should always have the means of writing at hand. 
I know some men who make copious notes on the 
backs of letters, on the margins of their Brad- 
shaws, on the fly-leaves of their guide-books — and 
forget them almost as soon as they are made. 
Scattered memoranda of this kind are sure not to 
turn up when they are wanted. But a recognized 
memorandum-book is an aide-de-camp never off 
duty. — you may turn to it when you will. 



IMPLEMENTS OF WORK. 71 

Indeed, small matter though it seem to be, 
I hold that every workman should look well to the 
implements of his calling. There is a proverb, 
which saith that " A bad workman complains of his 
tools." It may be so ; but good workmen work 
better with good tools. To those who work with 
their hands, they are everything ; to those who 
work with their heads, they are of more account 
than may be supposed. " What are such gross 
material aids as these to the subtle agencies of 
the brain ? Is the flow of thought dependent 
upon the flow of ink from the pen ? " I am not 
ashamed to answer that I think good pens, and 
good ink, and good paper are " material aids " 
in more senses than one. When the thick ink 
cakes in the pen, and the pen only scratches the 
fluffy paper, and your " fine Roman hand " is 
miserably transfigured into ungraceful and unin- 
telligible hieroglyphics, is there no interruption 
to the flow of your thoughts ? Do you never 
lose an idea whilst you are vainly endeavouring 
to embody it on paper ? Is the fecundity of your 
imagination never checked by the disturbance of 
your temper ? Is it nothing to work in ease and 
comfort, with all appliances and means to boot ? 



72 WORK. 

Is it nothing to have an easy chair, and a spacious 
table, and a good expanse of carpet whereon to 
walk to and fro, between your throes of labour ? 
Let no man despise these things. A good room in 
itself is no small matter. Work when you can with 
the window open. Let in as much fresh air as this 
treacherous climate will permit. Do not sit too 
long at a time. Have a high standing desk 
whereby you may vary your attitude of labour ; 
and when you are busy, receive visitors standing, 
if you wish to get rid of them soon. 

And now I am reminded that something ought 
to be said about method in work. To be orderly 
and methodical is a great thing ; but I cannot 
help thinking that I might as well exhort my 
friends to be tall, or strong, or handsome, as to 
be orderly and methodical. Order and method 
are gifts, as beauty and genius are. I do not 
underrate their value, but I fear that they are not 
to be acquired. For thirty years I have been en- 
deavouring to import something like method into 
my habits of business ; but although time after 
time I have taken a fresh start, and resolutely 
determined to reform my old ways, I have igno- 
miniously failed. I have not yet given up my 






METHOD. 73 

efforts in this direction, but I feel that I might 
almost as well endeavour to be young again. I 
was bewailing this failure not long ago to a learned 
and thoughtful friend, who told me not to lament 
my deficiency ; " for/' he said, " if you had this 
quality, you would not be the man you are : you 
would be deficient in others, which have been 
equally, or perhaps more serviceable to you." 
And there is, doubtless, some consolation in this. 
Perhaps, then, I had better not strive any more to 
become what Nature has not made me. I may 
console myself by thinking that there may be a 
sort of method in the unmethodical. Indeed, it 
is often a fact, that what appears to another person 
to be a chaotic mass of papers, is perfectly intelli- 
gible to, and manageable by, the owner of them 
himself. And of all things the most hopelessly 
embarrassing to untidy men are attempts at tidi- 
ness — their own or others'. I doubt whether such 
attempts at reformation are ever successful in the 
long run ; and I know that whilst the process is 
going on, the transition-state is infinitely worse 
than the old order of things. You may find what 
you want, in due time, amidst the chaos which 
masters of method regard with such dismay ; but 



74 WORK. 

if you put things away, in pursuit of method before 
you have attained it, the chances are that you never 
find them. There is no search so tedious — often so 
hopeless — as a search after something, which you 
have put in a " safe place." 

It comes then to this : there are different kinds 
of workmen — workmen who create, and workmen 
who methodize and arrange. I do not here speak 
of internal arrangement — the arrangement of the 
different parts of an intellectual work — but of 
external or material order and arrangement. To 
arrange your ideas is one thing ; to arrange your 
papers is another. Some of the best and most 
rapid workmen I know are, in respect of order 
of this kind, hopelessly deficient. That a great 
deal of valuable time is lost in this way must 
be admitted. Nothing is in its right place. Papers 
are not to be found when wanted. Work is done, 
and then mislaid ; and more time is spent in 
endeavouring to find it than it would take to 
do it over again. But, after all, I am doubtful 
whether those who fold, and docket, and arrange, 
and have everything in such excellent order that 
they can find it at a moment's notice, do not spend 
more time in producing this state of things than 



MUTUAL AIDS. 75 

the more careless workman loses by neglecting it. 
The men of order are seldom men of much creative 
genius. What they do, they do slowly ; and they 
are commonly of more use in helping the real 
workmen than in doing work of their own. It is 
well for us that there are men of both kinds in 
the world. Until the One Perfect Workman 
vouchsafes to His creatures a diversity of qualities, 
a comprehensiveness of intelligence more nearly 
approaching His own, we must help one another, 
looking to our neighbour, in all humility, to make 
good our own deficiencies and to do that wherein 
we fail.* 

Yes, O friends and brother workmen, we must 
help one another. We are all of one Guild — 
Full-Brain cannot do without Neat-hand, any more 
than Neat-hand can do without Full-Brain. What 
poor, weak, miserable creatures we are when we are 
left to ourselves ! We want assistance at every turn 
of the road ; at every quarter of an hour of the 
day. We think much of our own especial work, 
but how few, when we consider, are the things that 

* I have been reading lately, but I cannot at this moment recall 
the passage, that it was said by one distinguished personage of 
another, — "He would have been the greatest man of his age, if 
he had only known the use of Red Tape.' 1 



76 WORK. 

we can do ; how many the things that we cannot. 
Is our own work better than other men's work ? 
Is it more essential to the happiness of mankind ? 
Does it keep the world a-going more than our 
neighbour's ? Not it. That stout fellow who has 
just brought the heavy luggage from the railway- 
station — could I do that ? Yet there is somebody 
— perhaps a whole family of somebodies, who 
cannot go to bed without that box. Is there any 
one thus dependent upon me for his night's com- 
fort or his morning's cleanliness ? Perhaps it is 
my privilege sometimes to be of use in my own 
way. If I work hard I have a right to expect 
that reward, and to trust that I benefit some one. 
All true workmen are public benefactors. Let us 
not measure ourselves against others and ask who 
is greater, who less. The " toppling crags of 
duty " are before us all. Let us strive " with 
toil of heart, and knees, and hands" to scale 
them, so that we may be brought, with His good 
help — 

1 ' close upon the shining table-lands 

To which our Lord himself is moon and sun. " 

[November, i860.] 



( 11 ) 




5 UCCE S S. 

| HAVE a great opinion of successful men ; 
and I am not ashamed to confess it. 

It was the fashion, some years ago, to 
sneer at Success — nay, indeed, sometimes to revile 
it, as though it were an offence, or at best a preten- 
tious humbug. This came out of the sudden infla- 
tion of some huge wind-bags, which as suddenly col- 
lapsed. To do honour to successful men was held 
to be arrant flunkeyism ; for a successful man was 
accounted little better than a flatulent impostor. 
Clever men drew pictures of Success represented 
by a mighty Juggernaut passing triumphantly over 
the necks of thousands of prostrate worshippers. 
Still cleverer men wrote brilliant stories of modern 
life, illustrating the rise and fall of seemingly suc- 
cessful men ; and imitative dramatists transferred 
these sketches of society to the Stage. The great 
imposture of Success was the pet subject of the 



7% SUCCESS. 

day. But a healthier social philosophy is now 
enthroned amongst us. We have begun to think 
that men who make their way to the front, be- 
coming rich or famous by the force of their per- 
sonal characters, must, after all, have something 
in them, though every now and then bubbles may 
arise, in which solid realities are reflected, only to 
burst into thin air. Have we not all been reading 
lately about " Self-Help" — and what has charmed 
us so much ? Are not our assembly-rooms, and 
lecture-halls, and mechanics' institutions, all over 
the country — I ask the question after a tolerably 
wide autumnal circuit of English provincial towns 
— are they not thrilling night after night with 
popular orations on " Self-made Men," or, as I see 
it phrased at times, " Self-built Men," and all that 
relates to them ? To prostrate oneself before what 
Success has won, be it power, or riches, or what not, 
may rightly be called flunkeyism ; but to honour 
what has won success is worthy worship, not to be 
condemned or restrained. It is veneration for that 
type of manhood, which most nearly approaches 
the divine, by reason of its creative energy. It is 
a good sign of the times that we appreciate it at 
its true worth. 



APPLICATION OF MEANS. 79 

It is not to be expected, however, that envy- 
should die out of the world ; and so long as there 
is envy, people will be found to talk about Luck. 
But Success does not come by chance ; Providence 
helps those who help themselves. We may fancy 
that two men adopt the same means towards the 
attainment of the same end, and because one suc- 
ceeds and the other fails, we may say that the one 
is more fortunate than the other. But the one 
succeeds and the other fails, because they do not 
adopt the same means towards the same end. Of 
the two pilgrims, who started on their journey, 
each with peas in his shoon, the one was not more 
fortunate than the other ; he was simply more 
wise. The man, who sank by the way, toil-w 7 orn 
and foot-sore, with drops of agony on his forehead, 
groaning with pain, may have been the better 
walker of the two. The race is not always to the 
swift, nor the battle to the strong. It is by the 
right application of your swiftness or your strength 
to the particular object in view that you make 
your way to Success. It is not only by doing the 
right thing, but by doing the right thing in the 
right way and at the right time, that we achieve 
the great triumphs of life. All this is to be dwelt 



80 SUCCESS. 

on presently. It is only here to be said that the 
varying results which we discern are not attributable 
to chance — not to external circumstances of any 
kind ; but to inherent differences within ourselves. 
Whatsoever Envy or Vanity may say upon the 
subject, Success is a substantial and enduring 
reality ; luck is a mere vapour that is speedily 
dissolved. " Wealth gotten by vanity," saith 
Solomon, " shall diminish ; but he that gathereth 
by labour shall increase." 

But what, it may be asked, is Success ? and 
who is the successful man? I have heard it said, 
that " all success is comparative ; " but with what 
is the comparison ? Not with the successes of 
others. In this sense all success is positive. The 
prime minister is a greater man than his butler, but 
he is not, therefore, a more successful one. You 
must measure the success of a man, not by the 
relation which his achievements bear to what 
others have achieved, but by their relation to what 
he himself has endeavoured. If he has kept a 
certain object steadily before him, and has attained 
it — no matter what the object be — he is a success- 
ful man. In another sense, too, Success is posi- 
tive ; for it admits of no drawbacks or abatements 



ITS COMPLETENESS. 81 

beyond the range of the object attained. If I 
strive to amass wealth, and I amass it, I am not 
the less successful because my son turns out a 
dissolute spendthrift and my daughter disgraces 
herself by a runaway match. Am I less successful 
as a poet, or a painter, because my wife is un- 
faithful to me, and I am miserable in spite of my 
success ? Success is one thing ; happiness is 
another. The boy, Warren Hastings, aimed at 
the Governor-Generalship of India, and the reco- 
very of his ancestral estates ; was he less a suc- 
cessful man because, when he had accomplished 
these objects of his ambition, his life was embit- 
tered by the persecution of his enemies ? And 
the boy Charles Metcalfe — he too aimed at the 
Governor-Generalship, and he attained not solely 
to that eminence, but to the prouder distinction of 
ruling " the three greatest dependencies of the 
British Crown." Was he less successful because, 
in the fulness of his fame, an excruciating bodily 
disease ate into his life and destroyed him by slow 
torture ? 

Even the disappointments and disquietudes of 
Success itself do not detract from its completeness. 
A man may not find the attainment of his object 

6 



82 SUCCESS. 

so exhilarating as the pursuit of it ; but for all 
this he does succeed. I knew a man whose 
desire it was to obtain a certain public situation. 
There was a particular post in a particular de- 
partment which he coveted, and he said to himself 
that he would obtain it. Night after night his 
way home led him down Whitehall, and as he 
passed under the shadow of the building which held 
the department of government which he aspired 
to enter, he would shake his fist at it, and say, 
" You grim old pile, you exclude me now, but 
some day I shall have a home in you, be sure." 
And he was right. Unlikely as success appeared, 
he succeeded, and even sooner than he had hoped. 
It was nothing very great that he had obtained. 
But the success consisted in this, that w T hat he won 
was the identical thing which he aspired and 
endeavoured to win. It is nothing to the point 
that other men had won much higher posts by 
their successful exertions. Nor is it a matter to 
be considered, when we would determine the 
measure of his success, whether he was happier 
than before. There may have been distressing 
sets-off in other directions, or the thing for which 
he had striven may not have satisfied him ; but 



COMPENSATIONS OF FAILURE. 83 

the positive success was there. All success, in- 
deed, is self-contained. If it were not, I am afraid 
that the catalogue of successful men might be 
printed on half a page. 

We may think about this at leisure. Vanitas 
vanitatum ! It is not the subject of discourse 
which I have chosen for myself. And I would 
rather, if I digress at all, step aside to ask whether 
it may not be that we all have our successes, though 
they be not of a kind of which the world takes any 
account. I do not think that it would be difficult 
to show that failures have their compensations ; and 
that oftentimes unsuccessful men profit in ways un- 
known to those who have achieved victories. There 
is a tendency to compassionate and to aid those who 
fall prostrate by the road-side, whilst those who 
stride on, conquering circumstances, are supposed 
to want neither pity nor help. Many a man has 
found the trade of being a "poor fellow" extremely 
profitable. It is commonly some unsuccessful 
member of a family that inherits all the odds and 
ends of property belonging to bachelor uncles and 
spinster aunts. " Poor fellow ! " it is said, w he 
wants it so much ; and he has been so attentive." 
Having nothing to do, or, at all events, doing 



84 SUCCESS j— 

nothing, he has abundant leisure to be " attentive," 
whilst the strider-on is perforce neglectful of those 
who lie out of his path. Now this truly is a kind 
of success, though it be born of Failure, and though 
such successful men are not of the order of those of 
whom I said, at starting, that I have a high opinion. 
I must keep, however, to the subject of recog- 
nized Success, as all men understand it, and inquire 
how it is attained. I have heard people laugh at 
the mis-quotation of that well-known Addisonian 
platitude : — 

"'Tis not in mortals to command success, 
But I'll do more, Sempronius — I'll deserve it." 

But I have thought the varia lectio involved in the 
blunder deserving of the highest consideration ; 
and I have been more disposed to admire than 
to ridicule the reading, 

" 'Tis not in mortals to deserve success, 
But I'll do more, Sempronius — I'll command it." 

More men have commanded success than have 
deserved it. There is nothing presumptuous in 
the idea. It is more presumptuous to talk about 
our deserts. What do the best of us deserve, but 
complete and disastrous failure ? 

It has been said, that " any man may have any 



JfVTH WOMEN. S5 

woman." The meaning of which I hold to be, that 
the persevering pursuit of any object must even- 
tually be crowned with success. Labor omnia 
vincit, as the copy-book text has it, and as the 
proverbs of well-nigh every country have it in 
other words. To set your mind resolutely upon 
the accomplishment of any purpose, is to go halfway 
to its attainment. Now, it common!}* happens, to 
pursue the illustration wherewith I commenced this 
passage, that they who are most successful with 
women are not the handsomest men. And the 
reason of this is obvious. Handsome men rely 
overmuch on their handsomeness. To use a 
metaphor, rather expressive than eloquent, they 
expect that all the pretty women will -"jump down 
their throats.'' But pretty women will not jump 
down their throats. This process of deglutition is 
not affected by them. They have no notion of 
being quietly absorbed. They must be won — 
bravely, laboriously, and with a becoming sense of 
what is due to them. Are we to think that we 
have only to sit quietly in our easy-chairs, and to 
twirl our moustaches ? Beauty is a divine gift ; let 
whosoever possesses it be thankful. Madame de 
Stael, one of the most gifted of mortals, said that 



86 SUCCESS. 

she would surrender all that she possessed in 
exchange for it. But Madame de Stael was a 
woman ; and I am now writing about men. Every- 
body knows that men care more about personal 
beauty in the other sex than women do, and for this 
reason, that pleasant sights and sweet sounds, and 
everything soft and gentle, is a delight and a refresh- 
ment to them. But the ordinary environments of 
women are soft and gentle. They lead compara- 
tively passive lives ; and that which most fascinates 
them in the other sex, is a sense of active power. 
What is softness and smoothness to them ? Bless 
them, they like the grit. Even the hard lines on a 
man's face — the pallor, nay, the less interesting 
sallowness of his cheek — are interesting to them, 
if they denote power. I repeat that personal 
beauty is a great gift, even to a man. But it is 
only as an accompaniment to other gifts that it 
contributes to success. Everybody knows what 
Wilkes, the ugliest man in England, said to 
Townshend, the handsomest. And it was not a 
mere idle boast. 

And so it is with intellectual gifts of a high 
order. The conscious possessor relies too much 
upon them. Fortune is represented as a woman 



GENIUS AND ABILITY. 87 

— do we not call her Dame Fortune ? — and she 
must be laboriously won. Are we to sit down by 
the wayside, and expect that she will seat herself 
on our lap ? u Any man may have any woman," 
and any man may have any thing, if he only goes 
about resolutely to attain it. But he must not 
trust too much to what he is. Genius, like beauty, 
is a divine gift ; let him who possesses it thank 
God with his whole heart ; but it is not by being, 
but by doing, that we achieve success ; and there- 
fore it is that the most gifted, like the handsomest 
men, are often passed on the road by men of 
second-rate abilities, or, more correctly, of inferior 
natural gifts. I would have this distinction kept 
steadily in view, for people too often use the word 
" ability " with reference to anything rather than to 
its true meaning. I am not one of those who have 
much faith in the general co-existence of inactivity 
with power. I hold that what men can do, they 
will do ; and I think it will be found that when 
they do it not, it is because they feel that they 
cannot do it. There may be great natural gifts 
resulting only in a dreamy, indolent, unproductive 
state of life. But this is because the possessor has 
no special aptitude for any particular thing — no 



88 SUCCESS. 

vocation, so to speak ; no consciousness of ability 
to carry out anything to a conclusion ; no resolute 
will to attempt it. Dress up the idea as we may ; 
cover it with whatsoever gloss of fine and attrac- 
tive words ; talk of the waywardness, the impul- 
siveness of genius ; it is, in its naked reality, no 
more than this — that whatsoever the natural gifts 
may be, their possessor lacks ability to do any- 
thing, and feels the inability within him. He does 
not see his way clearly to any definite result ; he 
does not concentrate his powers on any given 
object ; and he runs to waste, nothing better at 
the best than a splendid failure. 

To concentrate your powers on any given object 
— to go directly to the point, looking neither to the 
right nor to the left, and resolutely determining to 
succeed — is to secure Success. If once you begin 
to sprawl, you are lost. * I do not mean by this 
that we are to reject collateral aids. On the other 

* I learnt this lesson very early in life, on the box of the North 
Devon coach, receiving the rudiments of my education as a Jehu. 
It was night. I drove from And over to Blackwater ; and three 
elderly insides were ignorant of the danger to which they were 
exposed. "Keep them well together. Keep them well together. 
Don't let them sprawl," was all the advice I received from my 
instructor. The lesson was worth remembering on the great turn- 
pike-road of life. 



TRIBUTARY AIDS. 89 

hand, I would suffer all tributary streams to flow 
freely into the great main channel of your action. 
You may drive a dozen horses in the same chariot, 
if you can only keep them well together. You 
must converge to a centre, not diverge from it. If 
I w r ere to give way to the allurements of biogra- 
phical illustration, I should soon fill a volume, 
instead of only a few pages ; but here are a few 
lines from Plutarch, which I quote rather in the 
way of caution than of example : " There was in 
the whole city but one street in which Pericles was 
ever seen, the street which led to the market-place, 
and to the council-house. He declined all invita- 
tions to banquets, and all gay assemblies and 
company. During the whole period of his ad- 
ministration he never dined at the table of a 
friend." Emerson cites this with commendation 
in one of his lectures. But I cannot help thinking 
that it is a mistake. You should never forget the 
Market-place or the Council-house. But you may 
expediently dine at the table of a friend, or invite 
a friend to dine at your table, in the interests of 
the Market-place or the Council-house. You may 
often, in this way, make a greater stride on to 
success than by staying at home to post up a 



90 SUCCESS, 

ledger, or to wade through a volume of statistics. 
Successful men, we may be sure, have not confined 
themselves to direct action, or looked only to 
immediate results. More failures are consummated 
by want of faith and want of patience than by 
anything else in the world. We cannot grow rich 
by sowing mustard-seeds on a damp flannel, 
though they begin to sprout before our eyes. 
Concentration is not isolation or self-absorption. 
" Stick to your business, and your business will 
stick to you : " an excellent doctrine, doubtless ; 
but what if I stick to my business more closely 
by smoking a cigar in my back parlour, than by 
serving customers in my front shop ? What if I 
put aside some important work, claiming my 
attention, to dress for dinner, and to convey 
myself to the table of an influential friend, on 
the chance of gaining more by going out than by 
staying at home ? When I was a very young 
man, I wrote essays in illustration of what I then 
believed to be the folly of such a course. But as 
I grow old, every year convinces me more and 
more that social intercourse, of the right kind, 
is a material aid to success. Often the gain is 
palpable to you at once, and you count your 






SOCIAL INTERCOURSE. 91 

advantage as you take off your dress-coat. But 
if not, it will find you out after many days : you 
have sown, and in due season you will reap. If 
you do nothing more than assert your individuality 
— make yourself a living presence among men, 
instead of a myth, a nominis umbra — you may be 
sure that you have done something. Am I more 
or less likely to read your book, or to buy your 
picture, or to say a good word for you, if I have a 
chance, to some man in authority, for sitting next 
to you at our friend Robinson's, and thinking you 
a pleasant fellow ? At all stages of your journey 
it will be the same. It is not more incumbent 
upon you to remember this, that you may gain a 
high place, than that you may keep it. Our 
statesmen are wiser in their generation than 
Pericles. There is Lord Tiverton, the very per- 
sonification of smiling success. Does he " decline 
all invitations to banquets, all gay assemblies, all 
company ? " 

Now, all this does not in any way militate 
against the theory of concentration. In a work 
of art there may be great variety of detail with 
perfect unity of aim. Every accessory should 
contribute to the one general result — should illus- 



92 SUCCESS. 

trate the one leading idea. Every detail that is 
foreign to the subject is so much sheer waste of 
strength. And so it is in the conduct of life. With 
one object set steadily before us, we may have 
many varying activities, but they will all assist 
the main action, and impart strength and consis- 
tency to it. Singleness of aim, I repeat, in nowise 
demands monotony of action. But if you allow 
yourself to be diverted from this singleness of 
object, you are little likely to succeed in life. 
" Art is long — life is short." Knowing this there 
is an universal tendency amongst us to go in 
search of specialities. General practitioners seldom 
get beyond a respectable mediocrity, whilst your 
specialists attain to eminence and wealth. If an 
eye or an ear be affected, we seek out the man 
who has made that particular organ the study of 
his life. In the pursuit of that one object, the 
oculist or the aurist may have studied the mecha- 
nism of the whole human frame, and the general 
physiology of man, but only in their relation to 
the particular organ to the full understanding of 
which he is devoting all the energies of his mind. 
He cannot, indeed, understand his subject without 
the aid of this contributory knowledge. But all 



SPECIALITIES. 93 

that is not contributory is waste. In the same 
manner, lawyers succeed by studying special 
branches of their profession ; and literary men 
are successful in proportion as they stick to their 
specialities, or rather as they are fortunate in 
having any. If a man can w r rite well on any one 
special subject — no matter what that subject may 
be — he is sure to find profitable occupation for his 
pen, whilst the general dealer in literary wares, 
though more highly gifted by nature, may fail to 
provide himself with bread. The popular appre- 
ciation of this general fact expresses itself in 
the w r ell- known proverb that " a jack-of-all- 
trades is master of none." The world has no 
faith in Admirable Crichtons. They may be 
very pleasant fellows in their way, but mankind 
in general would rather not do business with 
them. 

A shrewd, intelligent man of the world, and 
one, too, who had been eminently successful — for 
from a small beginning he had risen to the highest 
place in the Department to which he had been 
attached, and had made the fortunes of his whole 
family, brothers, sons, and nephews, as well as his 
own — once said to me : — " The longer I live, the 



94 SUCCESS. 

more convinced I am that over-sensitiveness is a 
great mistake in a public man." He might have 
said in all men who desire to succeed in life. Now, 
I wish it to be understood, that what is expressed 
here by the word " over-sensitiveness " does not 
signify over-scrupulousness. Be as scrupulous as 
you will. Do nothing that can give you a single 
pang of conscience. Keep your hands clean. Tf 
you cannot do this, and succeed, sink into the 
abysmal depths of failure, unsoiled and unspotted, 
with skin clear and white as a little child's. But 
do not be over-sensitive on the score of pride, or 
vanity, or dominant egotism. Every successful 
man, you may be sure, has had much to mortify 
him in the course of his career. He has borne 
many rebuffs ; he has sustained many failures. 
What if men do not understand you, are not 
inclined to encourage you, and exercise the 
privilege of age or superior position ; — bear with 
it all, Juvenis, your time will come ; you may take 
your change out of the world when you are a little 
older. Bah ! how does it hurt you ? " Hard words 
break no bones," saith the proverb. And they 
break no spirit that is not of the feeblest. The 
world may laugh at your failures — what then ? 



" TRY AGAIN." 95 

Try again, and perhaps they will not laugh. Try 
once again, and perhaps it will be your turn to 
laugh. " He who wins may laugh," saith another 
proverb. If you have the right stuff in you, you 
will not be put down. There is a man now 
amongst us, a man of genius, who aspired to 
take a part in public affairs. After much travail, 
he obtained a seat in Parliament. And the House, 
knowing he could write, assumed that he could not 
speak, and when he rose, they laughed at and 
hooted him. He told his assailants, that the time 
would come when they would listen to him — and 
he was right. He spoke the words of prophecy 
and of truth. And the time did come, when they 
not only listened, but when the men who had 
despised came to fear him, or to worship him ; 
and, when he rose, either shrank appalled and 
dismayed, or looked to him for the salvation of 
their party, and applauded to the echo. 

There are various roads to Success, but I am 
somewhat inclined to think that the surest is 
gravelly and gritty, with some awkward pitfalls 
and blinding quicksets in the way. Was that 
famous nursery rhyme of the Man of Thessaly, 
think you, written but for the entertainment of 



96 SUCCESS. 

babes and sucklings ? or was it not rather meant 
as a lesson to children of a larger growth, to the 
adolescents of our nurseries of learning, starting on 
the great journey of life ? Every one knows the 
story — how the hero of it 

" — jumped into a quickset hedge 
And scratched out both his eyes." 

Doubtless, the way with most of us, looking not 
before we leap ; gcing ahead too rapidly at the 
outset — not calculating our juvenile strength, and 
jumping into the midst of what we think we can 
clear at a bound. Do we not all think ourselves 
" wondrous wise/' and, thinking so, encounter blind- 
ing disaster ? But are we, therefore, to go darkling 
all the rest of our lives ? It was not to teach us 
this that the great epic of the Man of Thessaly 
was written. He had the true heroic stuff in him ; 
and he did not sit down and bewail his loss, help- 
less and hopeless. 

* ' And when he saw his eyes were out. 
He had reason to complain ; 
But he jumped into the quickset hedge, 
And scratched them in again." * 

* I write the words as I learnt them in my childhood ; but there 
are various readings of ail (so-called) nursery rhymes, and I am 



FIRST FAILURES. 97 

And such is the right way to fight the battle of 
life, to grapple with the failures and disasters which 
beset your career. Go at it again ! You may have 
reason to complain that your good intentions meet 
with no better results ; that the singleness of your 
aims, the purity of your aspirations, and the high 
courage of your first grand plunge into life, lead to 
nothing but a torn face, smeared with blood, and a 
night of painful bewildering blindness. But it is 
better to strive manfully than to complain weakly ; 
brace yourself up for another plunge ; gather 
strength from defeat ; into the quickset hedge 
again gallantly ; and you will recover all that you 
have lost, scratch your eyes in again, and never lose 
your clearness of vision for the rest of your life. 

Yes, indeed, if .we have the right stuff* in us, 
these failures at the outset are grand materials 

told that more correctly the concluding portion of the legend of the 
Man of Thessaly runs thus : — 

" But when he saw his eyes were out, 
With all his might and main, 
He jumped into the quickset hedge, 
And scratched them in again. , ' 

This reading is more emphatic than the other, and better illustrates 
my text. It is by going at it again, "with all one's might and 
main," that we repair our foregone disasters and gather strength 
from defeat. 



98 SUCCESS. 

of success. To the feeble they are, of course, 
stumbling-blocks. The wretched weakling goes 
no farther ; he lags behind, and subsides into a 
life of failure. And so by this winnowing process 
the number of the athletes in the great Olympics 
of life is restricted to a few, and there is clear 
space in the arena. There is scarcely an old man 
amongst us — an old and successful man— who will 
not willingly admit that he was made by his 
failures, and that what he once thought his hard 
fate was in reality his good fortune. — And thou, 
my bright-faced, bright-witted child, who thinkest 
that thou canst carry Parnassus by storm, learn to 
possess thyself in patience. Not easy the lesson, 
I know; not cheering the knowledge that success 
is not attainable, per saltiun, by a hop-step-and- 
a-jump, but by arduous passages of gallant per- 
severance, toilsome efforts long sustained, and, most 
of all, by repeated failures. Hard, I know, is that 
last word, grating harshly upon the ear of youth. 
Say, then, that we mollify it a little — that we strip 
it of its outer crustaceousness and asperity, and 
truthfully may we do so, my dear. For these 
failures are, as I have said, but stepping-stones to 
success ; gradtts ad Pamassum — at the worst, non- 



FIRST FAILURES. 99 

attainments of the desired end before thy time. If 
success were to crown thine efforts now, where 
would be the great success of the hereafter ? It is 
the brave resolution to " do better next time " that 
lays the substrate of all real greatness. Many 
a promising reputation has been prematurely 
destroyed by early success. The good sap runs 
out from the trunk into feeble offshoots or suckers. 
The hard discipline of the knife is wanted. I 
repeat that it is not pleasant ; but when thou 
feelest the sharpness of the edge, think that all 
who have gone before thee have been lacerated in 
like manner. At thine age I went through it all. 
My first great effort was a tragedy upon a grand 
Elizabethan model. It was submitted by a friend 
to a competent critic, who pronounced it to be 
" morally, dramatically, and irremediably bad." I 
write the words now with a strong sense of gra- 
titude to that critic ; but I have not forgotten the 
keen agony with which they burnt themselves into 
my soul, when I first read the crushing verdict in 
a dingy back bedroom in the Hummums. We 
have all gone through it, my dear. We ! " How 
we apples swim." I would speak of men — the 
real Chivalry of letters — whose bucklers I am not 



ioo SUCCESS. 

worthy to bear. Ask any one of them about their 
early struggles with a world incredulous of their 
genius, and what a history they will have to tell 
thee ! Ay, and what a grand moral ! Is there 
a true knight among them, who does not, on the 
very knees of his heart, thank God for his early 
failures ? 

In estimating the sources of Success, account 
must, doubtless, be taken of constitution. Some 
of us have constitutional defects, by which others 
are not incapacitated or impeded. Sustained 
energy is possessed only by those who have 
powerful digestive organs. Men of a bilious, 
sanguine, irritable nature are capable of great 
spasms of energy, which carry them along so 
far at a time, that they can allow for intervals 
of prostration. But there is nothing like a steady 
flow of health — an equable robustness of manhood. 
It is a blessing, which few men possess, and for 
which the possessor has reason devoutly to be 
thankful. Most of us are sensible of intervals of 
feebleness and weariness, when we are incapable 
of any great exertion ; when we feel painfully 
that we are not doing the work which we had 
set ourselves to do, that we are falling behind 



THE FRAIL FLESH, 101 

in the race, and suffering day after day to slip 
by without our making any impression on the 
sand. For some time, I doubted much as to the 
best mode of dealing with Nature in such a case — 
whether it were better to make the dominant will 
assert itself, and to go on in spite of the unwilling- 
ness of the natural man ; in spite of weakness, and 
lassitude, and continual entreaties from the frail 
flesh ; or to let Nature have her way at once, and 
succumb contentedly to her demands. On the one 
hand, there is the fear of doing your work badly — 
perhaps of having it to do all over again, or of 
making on the minds of others, whom you wish 
to influence favourably, an impression of feebleness 
rather than of strength. There is, moreover, the 
risk of extending the period of lassitude and 
incompetency by doing violence to Nature ; per- 
haps, indeed, of permanently enfeebling your 
powers. On the other hand, there is the danger 
of making compromises with your active powers, 
and yielding to the temptations of indolence. We 
may mistake idleness for inability, and follow our 
self-indulgent inclinations, rather than be swayed 
by an honest sense of what is wisest and most 
befitting the occasion. It is difficult to lay down 



102 SUCCESS. 

any precise rules on the subject for the guidance 
of others. If every man asks himself what is his 
besetting infirmity, and answers the question con- 
scientiously, he will be able to decide whether he 
runs greater risk of injuriously forcing Nature, or 
of yielding too readily to her suggestions. If you 
know that you are not indolent — if you have, for 
the most part, pleasure in your work, and never 
need the spur — you may safely pause, when your 
energies are flagging, and you feel an indescribable 
something that resists all your efforts to go forward 
on the road. It is better not to do a thing at all 
than to do it badly. You may lose time. What 
then ? Men, stripping for the race of life, should 
account no time or money thrown away that con- 
tributes in any way to their physical health — that 
imparts tone to the stomach, or strength to the 
nerves. And we should never forget that we do not 
sustain our energies best by keeping them always 
on the stretch. Rest and recreation are no small 
parts of discipline. The greater the work before 
us the more need we have of them both. 

I am nearing, not the end of my subject, but 
the end of my space, and I see before me much 
which I had purposed to say, but which must be 



FAITH. 103 

left unsaid, for such a theme is not easily ex- 
hausted. But there is one matter to which, before 
I conclude, I especially desire to invite attention. 
I have heard it said, that if we expect to get on 
in the w r orld, we must be suspicious of our neigh- 
bours. "Treat every man as if he were a rogue." 
Now, if this were a condition of Success, Success 
would not be w r orth having — nay, indeed, it would 
be wholly intolerable : commend me to a life of 
failure. But it is not a condition of Success. To 
know an honest man from a rogue, and to act 
accordingly, is doubtless a great thing ; but, if we 
are to treat all mankind on our journey through 
life as rogues or as honest men, why, I throw up 
my cap for the latter. We may be cheated, it is 
true ; tricked, cozened, defrauded ; and we may 
throw away that which worthily bestowed might 
have really contributed to our success. It is a 
serious matter to waste our strength — to squander, 
in this manner, the materials of Success. Suc- 
cessful men, it may be said, do not make blunders 
of this kind. I am not quite sure of that ; besides, 
who knows but that the strength may not be wasted 
after all ? A good deed done in a good spirit can 
never be thrown away. The bread cast upon the 



io4 SUCCESS. 

waters may return to us after many days. This at 
least I know, that if it be true, as I have said, that 
Providence helps those who help themselves, it is 
no less true that Providence helps those who help 
others. " The liberal deviseth liberal things, and 
by his liberality shall he stand." It was not 
meant that we should stand alone in the world. 
Whatsoever may be our strength, whatsoever our 
self-reliance, there are times and seasons when we 
need a helping hand, and how can we expect it to 
be stretched out to us, if we always keep our own 
in our pockets ? And if we do not trust others, 
how can we hope to be trusted ourselves ? I am 
not writing now about high motives, but about aids 
to Success. Still I would have it borne in remem- 
brance that there is a vast difference between 
looking for an immediate or direct return for every 
kindness done to a neighbour, and having faith in 
the assurances of Providence that as we mete to 
others so shall it be meted to us. The recipient of 
our bounty may turn his back upon us and go 
forth into the world only to revile us ; but it does 
not follow therefore that we have wasted our 
generosity, or that the next shipwrecked brother 
who comes to us should be sent empty-handed 



MUTUAL AID, 105 

away. Let us only have faith and patience, and 
we shall find our reward. Doubtless, there may be 
exceptions — apparent, if not real ; but my expe- 
rience of life teaches me that men who are prone 
to assist others commonly thrive well themselves. 
The most successful men of my acquaintance are 
at the same time the most liberal. Their system is 
to treat their neighbour as an honest man until 
their commerce with him has proved that he is a 
rogue, and I do not think that men are less likely 
to be honest for finding that they are trusted by 
their neighbours. 

This matter of mutual aid is a point much to 
be considered. Self-reliance is a great thing, but 
it may sometimes carry us out of our depths. 
Successful men are commonly as ready to be 
helped by, as to help, others. They know how to 
turn inferior agency to good account. After all, 
that which any man can do by himself is very little. 
You must turn the energies of other men to account 
in furtherance of your own. The right thing is to 
identify their interests with yours, and not only to 
make them believe that by helping you they are 
helping themselves, but really to ensure that it is 
so. My belief is, that selfish men do not succeed 



106 SUCCESS. 

in life. Selfishness is essentially suicidal. You 
know instances to the contrary, you say. Are you 
sure of it ? Appearances are sometimes deceitful. 
There are men who bear the appearance of selfish- 
ness — who are harsh in manner, stern of purpose, 
seemingly inaccessible and unyielding— but there 
are soft spots under the grit. They do things 
differently from men of a more genial tempera- 
ment. But what right have we to expect that 
every one should wear our colours ? Stern men 
are not necessarily selfish men. There are men 
who, conscious of the excessive softness of their 
natures, have felt the necessity of induing a sort 
of outer crust or armour of asperity, as a covering 
or protection for themselves, and who thus, in their 
efforts to counteract a tenderness approaching to 
weakness, do manifest injustice to the goodness of 
their hearts. I have known men, too, noted for an 
almost impenetrable reserve, who were in reality 
thus reserved only because no one invited their 
confidences. The injudicious bearing of those with 
whom they lived had brought them to this pass. 
The respect and deference of inferiors, whether 
of the family or only of the household, if in excess, 
will often produce this result. Reticence begets 



OPENNESS AND RESERVE. 107 

reticence. But men of this kind often long for an 
opportunity of letting loose their pent-up confi- 
dences, and, if you only touch the right spring, 
will raise at once the lid of their reserve, and show 
you all the inner mechanism of their hearts. Ay, 
4nd how grateful they will feel to you for giving 
them the chance ! What a sense of relief is upon 
them when they have thus unburdened themselves. 
We little know what a deep wrong we sometimes 
do to others by suffering this outer crust of reserve 
to gather about them. 

Whether you govern best by a reserved, digni- 
fied demeanour, or by an open, cheery manner, 
may be a question. Each has its advantage, and 
each is very effective in its occasional deviations 
into the system of the other. The genialities of 
stern men, and the asperities of genial ones, are 
each very impressive in their way. Indeed, the 
question of manner, in connection with my present 
topic of discourse, is one of such high importance 
that I cannot summarily dismiss it. I do not say 
that it is a thing to be studied. To lay down any 
rules on the subject is a vain thing. People who 
shape their outward behaviour with elaborate 
design generally overreach themselves. Nothing 



io3 SUCCESS. 

but a really natural manner is genuinely successful 
in the long run. Now the natural manner of some 
people is good — of others hopelessly bad, though 
there may be little difference in the good stuff 
beneath. It is hard that we should be prejudiced 
by what is merely superficial ; but we are. I have 
heard it said that this is not prejudice, — for the 
manner is the outward and visible sign of the man. 
But there are very excellent people in the world 
with manners the reverse of pleasant — people 
shy and reserved, or brusque and boorish, with 
whom personal intercourse is by no means a 
delight. Others, again, there are, with whom half 
an hour's talk is like an invigorating bath of sun- 
shine. In this last there is an element of success. 
There is another successful manner, too — one which 
impresses every one with a sense of your power. 
If you have both — that is, a manner at once 
gracious and powerful, you have everything that 
you can wish as an outward aid to success. A 
thoroughly good manner will often do much to 
neutralize the ill effects of an unprepossessing 
appearance. But an ill-favoured countenance may 
be a stumbling-block at the outset that is never 
surmounted. It repels at the first start. There 



VICARIOUS SUCCESS. 109 

are people described as " unpresentable," who have 
giants to contend against at their first start in life. 
When they have once made their way in the world, 
the insignificance or grotesqueness of their appear- 
ance is a matter of no moment. Nay, indeed, we 
may not unfairly assign some additional credit to 
the man who has forced his way to the front, in 
spite of all physical defects and personal draw- 
backs. But it is an awful thing for a young 
beginner to have to contend against the impedi- 
ments of a bad face, an insignificant or an ungainly 
figure, and a bad manner in the presence of others. 
However material to the subject under discus- 
sion, these last remarks appear here in the nature 
of a digression ; and I do not know that I can 
close this essay in any better manner than by 
returning to what I was saying about mutual help. 
Great as is self-help, I am disposed to think that 
mutual help is greater. If we contribute to the 
success of our neighbours, that is a success in itself. 
There are few of us who may not do something in 
this way, assured that we shall not do it in vain. 
And there are few of us who do not want, or who 
have not at some time of our lives wanted, a 
helping hand, and been saved by its timely exten- 



no ■ SUCCESS. 

sion. Liberality is not for nothing. — " The liberal 
man shall be made fat, and he that watereth shall 
be watered himself." 

And there is this to be said for the success 
which may attend our efforts to make others suc- 
cessful — that nothing can ever take it from us. 
What we do for ourselves is perishable ; what we 
do for others is abiding. There are many draw- 
backs from our own successes ; none from the 
success attending our contributions to the successes 
of our neighbours. Ay, indeed, there are seasons 
in the life of almost every successful man, when he 
almost wishes that he had not succeeded. My 
friend VETUS, you can remember, I doubt not, 
when you w r ere just budding into fame, how all 
men spoke well of your doings. And you are 
doing still better now ; but all men do not speak 
w r ell of what you do. They are as tired, as the 
people were of old of hearing the praises of 
Aristides, and they would ostracise you with as 
much pleasure. But have comfort ; that is a part 
of success, sent to teach you the true value of it. 
No one is successful, until he has been well abused. 
And it is no small thing at the close of life to 
know how little you have done. It is good that a 



THE BEST SUCCESS OF ALL. in 

time should come to all " quando etiam sapientibus 
cupido glorise novissima exuitur " — when wise men 
lay aside even " the last infirmity of noble minds," 
the love of fame ; and think that the best that 
they have done for themselves is but a failure. 
But what you have done for others is an enduring 
possession. The bank-note which you gave to 
Asterisk, when at the last gasp of his failing for- 
tune, and which set him on his legs again, and 
gave him a fresh start and a successful course ; 
the appointment which you got for Dash, when a 
hopeless stripling, and which placed his foot on the 
ladder, which he ascended to a high place in the 
public administration of his country ; the encou- 
raging review of Blank's book, which revived his 
drooping spirits, just as he was on the brink of 
despair, and made him a successful author (what 
matter that he has since driven his critical beak 
into your heart ?) — the title which your successful 
advocacy in high places gained for Quis-quis — 
nothing can ever take these good gifts away from 
you ; so let us think more of them than of what 
we do for ourselves, for they constitute the only 
genuine SUCCESS. 
{December, i860.] 



( H2 ) 



THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 




HEN I was very young, I wrote a novel. A 
friendly publisher placed it, with a kind 
word or two, in the hands of his literary 
adviser, who pronounced upon it a verdict singularly 
adverse, not to say altogether crushing. How I 
despised the surly critic for it ! How assured I was, 
in my inmost heart, that he was ineffably ignorant 
and demonstrably wrong, envious, malignant, a hater 
of his race ! But I see him now, at odd times, on 
public and on private occasions, a bland and bene- 
volent elderly gentleman ; and I shake hands with 
him, knowing that he denounced the first efforts of 
my Muse, but feeling that instead of my bitter 
enemy he was my very good friend, and that, in 
truth, my novel was far more guilty of heinous 
literary crimes than in his over-lenient verdict. 

I do not now remember the words of his judg- 
ment — that judgment which dispersed all my 






INCONSISTENC V. 113 

cherished visions of an honoured manhood, and 
sent me back to hobbledehoyism and dependence 
beneath my father's roof. It is an old story now, 
and if I could recover a transcript of this first criti- 
cism, every word of which, at the time, burnt itself 
into me like hot iron, I would frame it for the 
encouragement of my children. But there was one 
particular passage of the Reader's judgment which, 
after the lapse of a quarter of a century, I have not 
forgotten. He dwelt upon the singular incon- 
sistencies of the hero of my story, maintaining that 
the man who did this or that good thing could not 
have done this or that bad one. I took the hint, 
called my tale The Inconsistent Man, put upon the 
title-page an appropriate morality from Words- 
worth, and published the novel at my own risk. 
And I have often since thought that if it had had 
no more serious defect than the inconsistency of 
its hero, there was no reason why it should not 
have succeeded. But as it had scarcely anything 
that a novel ought to have, and almost everything 
that a novel ought not, it is mere matter of course 
that it failed. How coolly one writes about these 
failures now — fearful and terrible as they were at 
the time — almost, indeed, rejoicing in them. And 



ii4 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

why not ? Are not these early failures wounds 
inflicted upon us in honourable battle ? May we 
not be proud of our scars ? There is heroism 
needed for that conflict ; and shall the hoary 
veteran not recite the audacities of his youth ? 
May there not be deeds done out of uniform 
worthy of Victoria Crosses ? Truly, I have known 
such. We may not bear about with us an empty 
sleeve or other outward insignia of our gallantry ; * 
but we may have had wounds less readily healed 
— agonies less easily borne — and may have gone 
through it all with equal constancy and courage. 
But I have recalled this juvenile experience, 

* I saw a pleasant sight, the other day, since this sheet was 
written. Hard by the great palace of Westminster, there stood at a 
corner, in his neat uniform of green, leaning against a post, and 
ready to be hired, one of that useful body of men called commis- 
sionaires, who do our errands so much more quickly and more cheaply 
than the old race of ticket-porters — an old soldier with three medals 
on his breast. As I neared him, on my way to my daily work, I 
saw another old soldier approach him — an older soldier, and of a 
higher rank, with bronzed cheek, and white moustache, and erect 
carriage, and a noble presence ; one whom there was no mistaking, 
though dressed in the common garb of an English gentleman. When 
he saw the medals on the commissionaire's breast, his face brightened 
up, and he stopped before the man in green, and with a pleasant 
word or two, took up the medals, one after another, in his one hand, 
and then I saw that he had an empty sleeve. And when I looked 
at the commissionaire, I saw that he also had an empty sleeve. And 
I wished that I had been an artist, to paint that touching scene. 



CONTRADICTIONS. 1 1 5 

only to observe that, after a quarter of a century's 
adult acquaintance with life, I am even less minded 
than I was at nineteen to regard men as consistent 
unities. Consistency is so rare a quality — or, 
rather, such a rare combination of harmonious 
qualities — that if statues are not erected in the 
market-place to consistent men, surely they ought 
to be, as to the rarities and marvels of the earth. 
We think that we know our neighbours — our 
acquaintances — our friends ; but the chances are 
that we know them only in one particular aspect, 
and that, perhaps, the aspect which is least essen- 
tially true to the inner nature of the man. We are 
wont to say that So-and-So is not a likely man to 
do such-and-such a thing. Broadly, it may be 
said, that we cannot bring ourselves to believe that 
men, whose leanings are evidently towards virtue, 
who talk and write virtuously, can do things the 
reverse of virtuous ; and, when we find that they 
do such things, we are wont to cry out that they 
are hypocrites. The fact is, that they are not 
hypocrites. They may love what is good without 
doing it. Was David a hypocrite ? Was Paul a 
hypocrite ? " The evil I would not, that I do." 
How common a case it is. I knew a man who 



n6 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

stood in the felon's dock, who wore the felon's 
dress, who did the felon's servitude. I knew him 
when all men respected him. It was not only that 
he talked good things ; he did them ; he took 
pleasure in doing them. He had a hearty relish 
for good — I am sure that he had none for evil. 
But he fell — to the astonishment of the world he 
fell ; and when he lay there, utterly crushed, by 
reason of the tremendous height from which he 
had fallen, people with one accord said that he 
was a hypocrite. I remember well the dark faces 
that were turned upon me — faces not all masculine, 
the owners of which were rightly honoured by the 
world — when I ventured to say that I could not 
believe, having known him in his brighter days, 
that that poor, crushed sinner had artistically 
assumed a robe of sanctity for the concealment of 
his systematic iniquities. I cannot bring myself 
to believe it even now, after the lapse of years, 
when his image has faded somewhat from my 
sight, and his voice has grown dim in my ears. 
What I do believe is that there is a vast deal 
more of inconsistency than hypocrisy in the world. 
Hypocrisy is a laborious trade. The emoluments 
must be great if they are proportionate to the 






HYPOCRISY. 117 

pains of following it. But every man is not a 
hypocrite who does not act up to his professions. 
Video meliora,) proboque ; deteriora sequor. 

The Christian confession previously cited is but 
an unconscious rendering of the heathen. It is 
worse than folly to assert that a man is not to 
commend what is good because he is not able to 
practise it. Am I not to admire and to extol 
learning because I am unlearned myself ? For my 
own part, I hold that the less harm we do to 
others, the better ; and that, " if from the weak- 
ness of our natures we cannot always stand 
upright," it is far better not to sin, as some do, 
glorying in their sins, confounding good and evil, 
and leading weak people astray by pernicious 
example. It has been said, and brilliant is the 
saying, that " hypocrisy is the homage which vice 
pays to virtue ; " but, like other sharp epigrams of 
the same kind, this must be taken with some 
qualification. The homage which vice pays to 
virtue, by cloaking itself, is not always hypocrisy. 
Genuine hypocrisy is, primarily, homage to self. 
The hypocrite conceals his vices because he thinks 
that the revelation of them will be injurious to 
him. His homage consists only in the practical 



ii8 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

acknowledgment that vice is less seemly in men's 
eyes than virtue. But we more frequently pay our 
homage to virtue, because we really love virtue 
and would not willingly infect others, with the 
disease which we have not the constitutional power 
to throw off from ourselves. 

Another error very frequently committed is 
this. We learn that a man has done some wrong 
thing, and straightway we judge him to be alto- 
gether wrong. We are loth to give him credit for 
the possession of any good qualities. It is very 
true in one sense, that " morality admits of no 
sets-off." If a man runs off to America with his 
neighbour's wife, it is no excuse for his conduct 
that he paid his tradesmen before he went. But 
it would be very unjust to assume that because he 
has eloped with a paramour he has cheated his 
creditors and violated every moral and social 
engagement at the same time. A man may break 
one of the commandments without shivering both 
tables of the decalogue at a blow. The fact is, 
that many men who do very wrong things, have a 
great deal of good in them. Indeed, the very 
wrong that they do is often only a riotous de- 
velopment of some good quality ; something that, 



VIRTUE-BORN VICES. 119 

although fair, and smooth, and glossy, and beau- 
tiful to behold upon one side, is all rough, and 
tangled, and confused, and unseemly upon the 
other. The gusts of circumstance have caught it, 
and turned it the wrong side uppermost. But it 
has 2l right side, all the same. 

If it cannot be said that the father of evil had 
no originality of conception, and that all he could 
do was to turn our good qualities to his own profit, 
I am disposed to think that this notion borders 
very closely upon the truth. Vices pure and 
simple — vices wholly vicious in their origin and in 
their progress — there are, when we come to think 
of it, very few. Let it be accounted what paradox, 
what absurdity it may, when any foul crime has 
been committed, to declare that there was a root 
of Virtue somewhere beneath that great spreading 
tree of Vice, it is not, when we dig deep beneath 
the surface, so preposterous as it seems. Perhaps, 
there is no deadlier sin than revenge ; but has not 
the first of English moralists most happily called 
it " wild justice ? " Is there not at the bottom of 
it a virtuous hatred of the wrong done — a holy 
yearning after that divine attribute of justice? 
We would fain leave the matter in the hands of 



120 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

God ; but divine judgments are for the most part 
slow, and, lacking faith and patience, we would 
forestall the sentence of the one perfect Judge, and 
so our Justice breaks its bonds, runs w T ild, and in 
its wildness becomes Revenge, Very unseemly it 
may be to behold, very grievous to contemplate ; 
but it is, after all, only the wrong side of the 
stuff. 

Ah ! if we could only draw the line that sepa- 
rates good from evil — if we could only obey, in 
our hearts and in our lives, the mandate, "Thus 
far shalt thou go and no farther " — what a blessed 
thing it would be ! But we go on, little by little, 
up to the very verge of right, and silently we 
transgress the boundary, not intending to suffer 
ourselves on that other side, and not knowing that 
we are there. If, when we are about to pass the 
picquets into the enemy's country, some sentry- 
angel would only warn us of our danger, we might 
be saved in time ; but we pass on in the darkness 
right up to the advanced guard of the enemy, and 
are not conscious of our error till we find ourselves 
in the archfiend's camp, and all his batteries 
playing upon us. 

You have heard it said a thousand times, 



VIRTUE RUN RIOT. 121 

" God preserve me from my friends, and I will 
look after my enemies myself." Apply this to 
your own humanity, and pray to be preserved from 
your good qualities in the knowledge that you can 
look after your bad ones yourself. You are liberal ; 
beware of your liberality. You are loving ; beware, 
above all things, of that " rich loving kindness, 
redundantly kind," which leads us into so many 
snares and pitfalls. You have a strong sense of 
justice ; pray to be able to set a restraint upon it, 
lest you should become hard, intolerant, exact- 
ing. You are firm, resolute, constant ; seek better 
support than your own, or you may degenerate into 
obstinacy, obduracy, dogged resistance of con- 
viction, and impenetrable pride. I need not run 
through the catalogue. Every one knows the old 
couplet — 

M Vice is a monster of such hideous mien, 
As to be hated needs but to be seen." 

It is by that which is not hideous — by that which 
is not seen — that we are beguiled ; by the fair 
Delilah upon whose lap we lay our trusting heads, 
unconscious of the depths of treachery which lurk 
beneath that smooth face and that pleasant smile. 
It is thus that our temptations assail us ; thus that 



122 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

we are lured on to the death. We hear much in 
the pulpit and read in excellent books about our 
" besetting sins ; " but it is of our besetting, 
ensnaring virtues, or goodnesses, that we have to 
beware, both for ourselves and for others. Do we 
think enough of this ? Does it enter into our 
heads or our hearts as a matter whereof we should 
take sovereign account in the education of our 
little ones ? Who has not heard that pretty story 
of the child who, when asked how it was that 
every one loved her, made answer that she did not 
know, unless it was because she loved every one. 
Who would not have been the father of that little 
girl ? Who would not have been prouder of such 
a jewel than of the Koh-i-noor? Would you or I 
have saddened over that sweet speech, or dared 
to soil the pure reflection which it cast by any 
prophecies of coming evil ? And yet, truly, in 
that dear child's loving nature— and because so 
loving, therefore so loveable — there is much to 
deplore, much to dread. Thinking seriously of it, 
we know that of all temperaments it is the most 
dangerous — the one most likely to bring its pos- 
sessor to much sorrow and much sin. And, truly, 
it is right, if we can do it, to check this propensity 



LOVING NATURES. 123 

to love overmuch. But how can we do it ? Lecture 
as we may, the head will not understand, and the 
heart will repudiate our doctrine. Such a tender 
plant as this requires very careful handling. Can 
we snatch the baby-doll from the young arms, and 
thrust its fair waxen face between the bars of the 
fire ; or send, in her tearful presence, the sportive 
kitten to the inevitable pond ? And if we could, 
what then ? That treatment does not answer in 
childhood any more than in later life. We try it 
sometimes with our grown-up boys and girls, and 
only make a mess of it. No, if we would moderate 
such a tendency as this, we must above all things 
avoid violence. At best there is not much to be 
done ; but we may be watchful and considerate, 
and above all, we may take care to provide healthy 
objects of affection, and never to force the inclina- 
tions of a loving nature, from any worldly motives — 
any mistaken estimate of what we are wont to call 
u eventual good." Out of such efforts as this come 
the sad domestic histories, which make the records, 
now so tersely tragic, of the Divorce Court ; a few 
lines— just a few lines — the stories of half a dozen 
lives in half a newspaper column. 

What is more beautiful than the right side of 



124 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

this stuff, what is more hideous than the wrong ? 
It is all of the same woof, look at it as you may ; 
but, oh ! the difference. There is the " new com- 
mandment" given to you, broidered on the one 
side in fair characters ; and one of the seven deadly- 
sins glaring out upon you in ghastly letters from 
the other. Poor lost child, sinful and the cause 
of sin in others, cast away, unrepentant, smiling 
at night beneath the gas, what a very wrong side 
it is ! But it was fair and seemly to behold, before 
you turned that side uppermost. A trusting, 
loving nature ; guileless, unsuspicious : feeling no 
wrong and dreaming of none in others ; a strong 
tendency to hero-worship, veneration largely de- 
veloped ; capable of any self-sacrifice so it but 
please the one-beloved object. How grand in 
Iphigenia, how noble in Antigone ! But in poor 
Perdita, the sacrifice is not for a father or a brother ; 
and it is only a living death. 

Let no one say that this is "dangerous doc- 
trine." In truth, there is no doctrine in it. It 
is merely plain matter-of-fact. The doctrine, as I 
have already said, is that we should pray to be 
protected, not against our besetting sins, but 
against our besetting virtues. And, indeed, do we 



AMIABLE SINNERS. 125 

not so pray ? There is no temptation in sin ; it is 
anything but tempting. We are tempted by what 
is beautiful and alluring. There is a narrow line, 
very finely drawn, almost imperceptible, which, if 
you do not cross, you are safe. But the Tempter 
is continually enticing you to cross that line ; and 
you find yourself in his grip before you know that 
he is at your elbow. It is natural that when we 
write of love, we should draw our illustrations from 
woman, but there are men, too, " peccante in this 
kinde " — men of gentle, kindly natures, loving 
hearts, caressing manners — with something in their 
faces, when they talk to women, " like a still 
embrace ; " * men who could not w r ilfully do an 
unkind thing, and who forgive an injury as soon as 
it is inflicted upon them. But what a deal of mis- 
chief these amiable sinners do in this world of ours. 
They do not mean it. They would stand aghast 
at the thought of the iniquities into which they are 

* Note. 
" There was something in his accents, there was something in his 

face, 
When he spoke that one word to her, which was like a still embrace.; 
And she felt herself drawn to him — drawn to him, she knew not 

how, 
With a love she could not stifle, and she kissed him on the brow." 



126 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

likely to drift, if they were to see them fore- 
shadowed in the magic mirror of the Future, But 
they see nothing and on they go, giving free vent 
to the impulses of their loving natures, until all at 
once they wake to the knowledge that God's gift 
of love has blackened into a curse. The world 
may know it, or the world may not know it. Most 
likely it is profoundly ignorant ; it may be very 
inquisitive and very censorious : but how often it 
is grievously at fault. How often even Mrs. Grundy 
sees only the amiable husband, and the kind father, 
and the benevolent gentleman, where, if the curtain 
were raised, if the hidden life were revealed, if the 
wrong side of the stuff, with its frayed ends, were 
made clear to the vision, there would be such a 
cry of respectable indignation, such a shudder of 
virtuous horror, as would strike even the seared 
conscience of the sinner with dismay. Men who 
slide into wrong-doing, conscious that they mean 
no wrong, soon reconcile themselves to it, and 
might, without hypocrisy, express surprise when 
their offences come to be described by their proper 
names. All this can be readily understood. And 
the better we understand it, the more impressed we 
are with the marvellous truth of the aphorism that 



KIXDLY CRUELTIES. 127 

" hell is paved with good intentions." Nothing 
has been written more frequently than that men 
are worse than they seem — that, if we could only 
read men's thoughts . . . 

And, if we could, though many a " good man " 
might be shown to be worse than he appears, many 
a " bad man " might be revealed to us as some- 
thing better. On the whole, perhaps, our thoughts 
are better than our lives. Fatal errors — even 
deadly sins — are committed, which have a source 
of goodness, if we only trace those polluted waters 
back to their pure fount. There is many a tangled 
wilderness — many a dark forest, " whose very trees 
take root in love ; " many a cruel act that branches 
from the stem of a kind heart* And then as to 

* Very many years ago, in the prime of my verdure, happening 
upon a grave truth by accident, I wrote that \ ' the most unselfish 
people often do the most selfish things ;" and some critics, whose 
years and experience doubtless exceeded my own twice told, com- 
mended the paradox with a warmth that surprised me. But now 
that I have lived a quarter of a century longer in the world, I see 
the full force of the words far more clearly than when I wrote them. 
The cruelties of the kindly are often most grievous. Even in their 
self-sacrifices at times there is an egotism which gives them pleasure, 
and practically a total disregard of the sufferings of others. But 
they are honestly bent on self- negation, and resolute to bear their 
martyrdom bravely to the last gasp. Do not let us say, then, that 
they are selfish, and condemn them ; rather let us teach them how 
they may better contribute to others' happiness and to their own. 



128 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

the omissions — the good things which we would 
fain do, but do not — which we act in thought, but 
only in thought, yet still with a grave sincerity of 
purpose — how manifold they are ! Under the 
single apologetic heading of " want of time," we 
might most of us tick off omissions of this kind, 
which, had the will ripened into action, would have 
set up a dozen men with a capital of good deeds 
sufficient to qualify them for the calendar of saints. 
Almost every active-minded man sketches out for 
himself, in the course of his life, intellectual 
exploits, which it would take at least five centuries 
to perform. And we believe that there are a vast 
number of men whose unaccomplished works of 
charity and love could not be crowded into any 
smaller space of time. For want of time, we are 
continually failing in all the offices of friendship ; 
neglecting those who have strong claims upon us ; 
leaving visits unpaid, letters unwritten, hospitalities 
unrendered, all sorts of neighbourly duties unper- 
formed. How many kind letters does the mind 
write for us, when pen and ink are lacking, in the 
crowded streets, in the railway-carriage, or abroad 
in the fields ! How many messages of love does 
the spirit waft to distant friends ! How many far- 



GOOD INTENTIONS. 129 

off houses do we visit, carrying with us some token 
of affection ! How many welcome guests do we 
gather around our own boards — in everything but 
the solid substantiality of fact ! The dramatist 
who said that he had written all his play but the 
acts, gave expression to that which may be taken 
literally with reference to the great drama of life. 
There is friendship, kindliness, charity, hospitality, 
boundless sympathy — complete in everything " but 
the acts." Are we, then, all humbugs ? Not a bit 
of it. We are oftener humbugs in doing than in 
not doing. But we cannot expect the world to take 
the will for the deed. We must be content that 
judgment should be passed upon us for that only 
which is seen and done. When some stroke of 
good or of evil fortune befalls my friend, I must 
not, being silent, expect him to give me credit for 
the pleasure or the pain which I have not expressed, 
though it may have filled my eyes with tears and 
made me thrill with emotions of joy or sorrow. 
The letter or the visit of congratulation or condo- 
lence has been paid or written only in the spirit, 
and, though One who reads all hearts can see 
the untraced words on the sheet, and hear the 
sound of the unraised knocker on the door, 

9 



130 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

our best of human friends can hardly be expected 
to think that our silence at such a time is not 
cold, unkindly, and ungrateful. In these respects 
and in others, perhaps, of greater moment, we are 
most of us better than we seem. But life is short, 
and the battle thereof is very sharp and absorbing; 
and we have not always the wax spread upon the 
wall or the style ready to the hand. And so our 
brightest thoughts do not find their way into our 
books, or our best feelings into action. They fall 
by the wayside, and the birds of the air devour 
them. What I write now I had in my head last 
night, as I lay abed in the dark, but with far 
greater force of words and fertility of illustration. 
Why, then, it may be asked, did I not spring from 
my bed, grope my way to a match-box, light a 
candle, and rush to the library ? Why ! because I 
was weary, because I might have broken my shins, 
because I might have caught cold, and lost the 
bright thoughts, after all, before I had got the pen 
in my hand to give them permanent expression. 
They are lost for ever. It cannot be helped. 
I do not expect any credit for them. But I 
say that many of us are cleverer fellows than we 
are in our books, and, what is more to the point 



GIVING NATURES. 131 

of this essay, better fellows than we are in our 
actions. 

I have said that there is often cruelty to those 
whom we love best in the sacrifices which we make 
for their sakes. But it is not in affairs of love only, 
that this prodigal expenditure of self is often very 
hurtful to others. As there are loving natures, so, 
also, there are giving natures. Sometimes we find 
them both combined. Indeed, a loving nature is 
commonly a giving nature ; but to give is not 
always to love. I have known some very liberal, 
open-handed people, who would give away, indeed, 
the very shirt on their backs, and yet the depths of 
whose affections are very easily fathomed. And 
truly this is a dangerous quality ; almost as danger- 
ous as the tendency to love over-much. But there 
is something beautiful in it too ; and we are loth to 
check it, though we know that it should be checked. 
Yes, indeed, when that fine little boy on his way to 
the pastrycook's, with his right hand in the pocket 
of his knickerbockers, firmly clenching the small 
coin wherewith he is about to purchase buns for a 
nursery feast, is arrested at the very threshold of 
the palace of dainty delights, by the sight of a 
shivering beggar-woman with three small pinched 



132 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

children, lean-faced and wistful-eyed, on the pave- 
ment, and presently returns bunless and moneyless 
to the paternal roof; can you or I find it in us to 
utter word of reproach or even warning ? We may 
try — almost we may begin, when we hear the 
artless story, to say, " Clement,'' with a grave face, 
" I think, perhaps . . . ." — but before the first 
few words are out, the grave look gives way to a 
flushing smile, and all you can bring out is, " Clem, 
my darling, you're a dear, kind boy — here's a 
shilling ; go and buy the buns for me, and remem- 
ber, that the money is mine." And Clem goes, 
with his hand more tightly clenched in his knicker- 
bockers than ever, and, listening to no allurements 
on the way, he brings back the buns in safety, for 
he feels that neither the money nor the buns are 
his — until he gets fairly home, and then he becomes 
undisputed proprietor, and he has his feast, with 
interest, in the nursery. 

Now, I do not say that all this is right — 
morally, indeed, it is very wrong. " Cast your 
bread upon the waters, and it will return to you 
after many days." True, and what lessons of faith, 
hope, and charity — all three — does this teach us ? 
But we must not look for our bread, or our buns 



THE SNARES OF LIBERALITY. 133 

to come back to us in the next half hour. Where 
is the faith, where is the hope, where is the charity, 
to be exercised under such a dispensation ? It 
would be far better, therefore, if dear Clem had 
had his lecture and lost his buns. I speak very 
seriously. I know how hard it is to look disap- 
provingly upon a kind act. I know, too, that 
strictly speaking, we ought to assume that Clem 
would have been happier without his buns than 
with them. Little boys used to be so when I was 
one — in the story-books at least. But, bless the 
little knickerbockers, in these degenerate days our 
boys eat the second bag of buns with all the 
heartier relish for having given away the first to a 
beggar. If they are not rewarded with a second 
they go without, and, perhaps, are naughty enough 
sometimes to think regretfully, almost self-reproach- 
fully, of the sacrifice they have made. But even 
boy nature is weak ; and why should we expect 
these little ones to be stronger than grown men ? 
But here I am, according to my wont — drifting, 
drifting farther and farther away from the morality 
which I ought to teach. That dear little Clem 
ought really to be cautioned against the snares of 
liberality. He ought to be told that liberality is 



134 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

not always generosity. He should be cautioned 
lest, although it is now quite enough to tell him 
that the money in his pocket is not his, he should 
some day be liberal with that which is not his own. 
The man has not always so keen a sense of the 
sacredness of other people's belongings as the boy. 
At all events, we should watch well the good and 
kindly tendencies of our children. It is a common 
saying with respect to the boys, that their bad 
qualities will be " knocked out of them at school." 
If they be proud, their pride will be laughed out of 
them ; if they be quarrelsome, their contentious- 
ness will be thrashed out of them ; if they be mean, 
their meanness will be scorned out of them. But 
all their attractive qualities are sure to be en- 
couraged and developed, and, if in time they are 
not exaggerated, first into weaknesses, and then 
into vices, happy indeed is the youth, or wiser and 
stronger than his comrades. It is, therefore, I say 
again, the parental duty to warn a child against its 
kindlier and more attractive qualities, and, if pos- 
sible, to moderate and control them. If we do not, 
we may be sure that some day or other we shall 
see the wrong side of the stuff. 

In no respect, perhaps, is it of more sovereign 



SHIPWRECKS OF THE GENEROUS. 135 

importance to the moral well-being of a man, and 
to the general welfare of society, that the line 
which separates good from evil should be jealously 
observed, than in the manifestations of generosity 
run riot. Doubtless, it is a good thing to give, 
and to give freely. The Lord " loveth a cheerful 
giver." But if we do not take heed, our delight in 
giving may lead us not only to give what we have, 
but what we have not, and to be generous at other 
persons' expense. That miserable George Barn- 
well, who when I was young was preached at the 
rising generation on Easter Mondays, Boxing- 
nights, and other solemn occasions, from the great 
dramatic pulpits of the metropolis, went through 
prodigality of giving straight on to murder. This, 
doubtless, is an exceptional manifestation. We do 
not often, literally and corporeally, slay our bene- 
factors, in order that we may bestow rich gifts 
upon some frail friend, but figuratively, metaphori- 
cally, we are afraid, we often sin in this fashion, 
and are generous before we are just and honest. 
Many grievous shipwrecks have come out of this : 
and the fairest promises have led straight up to 
the felon's dock. Do you think that the poor, 
blasted wretch whom you see quailing and cowering 



136 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

there had any natural tendency towards dis- 
honesty ? Had that miserable George of whom 
I have spoken any taste for blood — any craving 
after the excitement of highway robbery ? He did 
it, not that he loved his uncle less, but that he 
loved another more, and he would rather have 
given her trinkets sprinkled with blood than not 
have given her any trinkets at all. 

This is altogether, as I have said, an extreme 
case. George took what he knew he could never 
restore. He could not restore life ; and he could 
not restore money to the dead. But a large 
number of those who are brought to ruin by their 
heedless liberality, have no thought of being dis- 
honest or even unjust. If, directly or indirectly, 
they take what is not their own, they believe in 
their hearts that they can make restitution before 
any one will miss it. Strictly, it is unjust — perhaps, 
dishonest — to give or to lend sixpence, unless you 
have the means, without that sixpence, of satisfying 
every rightful claim upon you. Say that the poor 
old lady, who nursed you in your tender childhood, 
is down in the rheumatics ; or that little Barbara, 
your handmaiden, who kept long and patient 
vigils beside the bed of your sick wife or your 



GENEROUS, NOT JUST. 137 

dying boy, has been crying her poor eyes out, 
because she has bad news from home of rent that 
cannot be paid, and little brothers and sisters who 
cannot be fed ; or that unhappy Bibulus Boanerges, 
the man of letters, who has done you, as you know, 
many a bad turn in his day, now come to drunken 
grief, seeks a good one at your hands — what right 
have you — as an honest man, to give to one or the 
other, if you cannot pay your tradesmen's bills on 
demand to the last farthing ? None. I know it ; 
I feel it. To give, when you owe, is to give what 
is not your own. This is a great moral truth to be 
impressed upon little Knickerbockers ; and, if you 
catch him giving a penny to a beggar when he 
owes sixpence at the lolly-pop shop — for in these 
days, even little Knickerbockers is prone to con- 
tract debts — doubtless it is the parental duty to 
admonish him severely on the spot. 

But — stern moralist as I am, after this I cushion 
myself on a but — but, if the wrong side of that 
fine, rich stuff of generosity be injustice and dis- 
honesty, justice and honesty also have their wrong 
sides. Just and honest men, whom I wot of, often 
suffer their virtues to exuberate, so as to overgrow 
some of the milder graces, which I, for one, cannot 



133 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

help esteeming. It may be our duty to narrow our 
obligations to the utmost, or, rather, to the inner- 
most ; to recognize only the primary duties ; to 
see no neighbourhood beyond our own fireside or 
the walls of our own counting-house ; to provide 
plentifully for our own offspring ; to owe no man 
anything ; and neither to borrow nor to lend. 
This may be right ; at all events, it is safe. I 
confess that I have not so read the precepts of 
Christianity — but, then, my understanding may 
be a false interpreter of the truth. " What claim 
has he upon me, that I should do this thing 
for him ? By doing it, I may injure those who 
have claims upon me." What claim ? Well, I 
confess that when we come to talk about claims, 
there is very little to be said. What claims 
have you and I upon the bounty either of Man 
or God ? It would end at last, I fear, if they 
came to be tried, in our throwing ourselves upon 
the mercy of the Court. It is, doubtless, a very 
grievous thing when men, under the inspiration of 
a vague feeling of universal brotherhood, forget 
that they are husbands and fathers. Books, we 
know, have been written to prove that our kindred 
have no claim upon us as kindred, but simply as 



UNPROFITABLE SERVANTS. 139 

members of the great family of mankind. Such 
doctrine is to be repudiated utterly. Home first, 
and the world afterwards. But there are those 
whose maxim it is, " Home first, and after that the 
Deluge." And the home of such men often con- 
tains a family of which the solitary member is 
Self. The honesty of such men is not to be 
questioned. If they were to die to-morrow, all 
their worldly affairs would be found in the nicest 
order — no man would be defrauded of his rights. 
But, Honestus, you must beware of your besetting 
virtue. It is possible that somewhat more may be 
required of you than this strictness of dealing. 
The unprofitable servant who wrapped up his 
talent in a napkin was, doubtless, a very honest 
man — safe to the extremest point of safety. But 
he did not satisfy his master. Honesty is a grand 
thing — "An honest man's the noblest work of 
God " — Ay, truly. But may it not be, that there 
are regions in which honesty is measured by a 
standard differing somewhat from our own — regions 
in which account is taken of other debts than those 
for food and clothing, doctors' stuff and servants' 
wages ? Have you paid those debts, O Honestus ? 
Being human, it cannot be expected of you that you 



Ho THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

have paid them in full — but have you paid even a 
reasonable instalment of your obligations ; or have 
you remembered the first half only of that most 
beautiful and most solemn precept, " Owe no man 
anything, but to love one another I " 

Yes, justice and honesty may run riot — the 
strong even as the weak ; but should we not be 
tolerant also of their excesses ? You do not like 
that cold, stern, reserved, case-hardened man. 
Geniality is more pleasant ; generosity is more 
alluring. But who knows, after all, that there may 
not be some soft spots beneath that coat of mail ? 
Who knows, indeed, that the armour has not been 
indued by very reason of those soft spots ? Men, 
ere now, warned in time of their besetting infir- 
mities, have steeled themselves against them ; have 
curbed their errant propensities, rudely and pain- 
fully, and in their outward aspects belied their 
inward natures, bringing themselves to it only by 
habitual resistance, and that, too, of the most 
determined, uncompromising kind. It is the 
tenderest-hearted wayfarer, peradventure, who 
buttons his coat most securely over his waist- 
coat pocket and passes on most rapidly, when the 
voice of distress reaches him from the shadow of 



RASH JUDGMENTS. 141 

the house, and he feels, rather than sees, a ragged 
figure pursuing him along the pavement in quest 
of alms. He hurries on, not to escape the mendi- 
cant so much as to escape from his own propensity 
to give, and by giving to relieve his feelings, at the 
expense of his principles, and to solace himself to 
the injury of others. And it may be the most 
jovial of boon companions who refuses the proffered 
glass, who seems to have no good-fellowship in 
him. Who knows that he may not be only too 
good a fellow — that it may not be the constant 
study of his life to hold in due restraint and 
governance the companionable qualities, which, 
without such a strong hand upon them, might drag 
him down to destruction ? 

Besides, even as regards more practical manifes- 
tations, we may often be very greatly mistaken. 
We may know the act of generosity that was not 
done ; but we may not know the act of greater 
generosity that was done — the greater sacrifice 
that forbade the lesser. I had a lesson of this 
kind taught me at school, the impression of which 
thirty years of active life have in no wise weakened. 
Our senior usher — it was a large private school — 
was a liberal, open-handed fellow ; he dressed 



142 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF, 

well, subscribed handsomely to the cricket-club, 
and had the reputation — it was a glory, not a 
reproach amongst us — of being " in debt in the 
town." But the second usher was an intolerable 
screw. He carried the fact upon his back ; it 
spoke out from all his actions. His conduct was 
as shabby as his coat. Of course our notion was 
that he was by nature a skinflint, and that he had 
hoards of gold "at the bottom of his box." He 
was a man otherwise of a kindly nature and a 
harmless way of life, so we despised rather than 
hated the wretch. But it came out afterwards that 
he had an aged mother and two sisters, relying 
solely for their maintenance on his scanty earnings ; 
and the saddest thing of all was — I know nothing 
sadder in history — that contemplating, at the end 
of one half year, a pleasant surprise for these poor 
people, he walked home, a hundred miles under a 
June sun, and appeared unexpectedly among them 
one sultry evening, only to find that all three were 
helplessly drunk. Next half we had a new usher, 
and for a little space there was a belief amongst us 
that the poor fellow had saved money enough to 
start a school of his own ; but little by little the 
truth, as I have told it, oozed out, with this 



RASH JUDGMENTS. 143 

pathetic addition, that he had gone hopelessly 
mad. We were very much grieved then at the 
rash judgments that we had passed, and we 
penitentially recanted by getting up a subscrip- 
tion, the largest ever known in the school, which 
kept the poor crazy wretch — he was quite harmless 
— under comfortable restraint, until he died. When 
the Doctor's eldest son married, and we subscribed 
for a silver tea equipage to present to the young 
couple ; and when that prodigal senior usher, at a 
later period, retiring upon his debts, and starting, 
upon that modest capital, a school and a wife of 
his own, we endowed him with a preposterous 
plated epergne fit for the dinner-table of a duke — 
we had availed ourselves of the opportunity to 
seek special aid from the parental purse. But in 
this instance it was a point of honour and of 
conscience with us all to make solemn sacrifice 
of self and to deny our appetites for the benefit of 
the man we had wronged ; and, I am sure, let 
alone the satisfaction of such an atonement, that 
the lesson we had all learned was worth the money 
ten times told. Many of us, I doubt not, were 
sadder and wiser boys from that time. We had 
seen only the wrong side of the stuff of that poor 



144 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

second usher's beautiful generosity, and we had 
not thought for a moment that it had a right 
side, smooth to the touch, lovely to the eye, gay 
with many-coloured flowers and bright with tissue 
of gold, such as might almost form the tapestry of 
heaven itself. The angels saw, if we did not ; and 
if we could only see things a little more with their 
eyes, how much less injustice would they have to 
write down against us ! 

In the case which I have cited above, the error 
committed, the wrong done, was of the most 
absolute, unqualified kind ; we judged the poor 
man to be ungenerous and selfish, when his 
generosity really was of the most self-sacrificing 
order. We altogether blundered over the fact ; 
but sometimes, although right in our facts, we are 
grievously astray in our judgments, looking only 
at the wrong side of the stuff, and refusing to 
believe that there is a right. We say that a man 
is obstinate ; that he is stern and inflexible. But 
we know not, perhaps, what a noble constancy 
— what a high sense of justice may lie beneath 
those more unattractive qualities. Even truth, 
smooth and beautiful as it is, turns up some- 
times a side harsh to the touch and uncomely 



A PLEA FOR SHYLOCK. 145 

to the sight. You and I may not sympathize 
with the Brutuses of the world : we may not 
have enough of the noble Roman in us to send 
our sons to the headsman, or to strike down 
our dearest friends " at the base of Pompey's 
statue ; " but it would be wrong to close our 
eyes to the fact that there is nobility in such 
exploits. In these cases, we may fairly assume 
that there is self-negation of the highest order. 
But in others, where there is nothing to justify 
the question, " Had you rather that Csesar were 
living and die all slaves ? " there may still be 
something to admire even in the ugliest manifes- 
tations of these sterner qualities. I have often 
thought whether Shakspeare intended utterly to 
close the hearts of his audience against that 
poor baffled Shylock. As for myself, I must 
acknowledge that I never go away altogether 
satisfied with the result. I have quoted already 
the Baconian aphorism that revenge is a kind of 
wild justice. I believe an ingenious essay has 
been written to prove that the dramatist was aided 
by his great contemporary in the composition of 
his plays ; and we might, at all events, pleasantly 
conjecture that these memorable words had been 

10 



146 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

given by the philosopher to the poet as a subject 
for a drama. That Shylock had a strong sense of 
justice is not to be doubted. He took a strictly 
logical view of the matter ; and was only beaten at 
last by a wretched quibble. I have known men 
who have stood out for their ounce of flesh, just as 
tenaciously as this persecuted Israelite, and with 
much less excuse. I have known as stern a reso- 
lution to exact what is " nominated in the bond" 
beneath a waistcoat of Christian broadcloth as 
beneath the Jewish gabardine. Not because such 
men desire to injure their neighbours, but because 
they have an immovable conviction of what is 
due to themselves. What they contend for chiefly 
is a full acknowledgment of their rights ; and, the 
acknowledgment once unreservedly made, they 
will sometimes yield the thing itself, and be 
generous, when justice is satisfied. I have thought 
sometimes whether Shylock would have taken the 
pound of flesh at last, if the judge had placed 
the knife in his hand. He might have been 
satisfied with his victory, and have heaped coals 
of fire on the Christian's head by showing that the 
dog he had spat upon could forgive. At all events, 
if I were a Hebrew, I would " adapt " the Merchant 



A WORD FOR LADY MACBETH. 147 

of Venice after that fashion. And even as a 
Christian I cannot help thinking that the smug 
Venetians, being clearly guilty of intolerance and 
persecution, escaped a little too easily. It may be 
observed that Shakspeare, even in the delineation 
of his worst characters, generally contrives to give 
us a glimpse of the right side of the stuff. Even 
that truculent Lady Macbeth is redeemed from 
utter iniquity by the " one touch of nature " which 
glimmers out in the exclamation, 

" Plad he not resembled 
My father as he slept, I had done it." 

When I first addressed myself to write upon 
this subject, after a colloquy with one to whose 
suggestions I owe more than his modesty will 
acknowledge, I was minded to treat it in another 
fashion. I purposed to show the evil that there is 
in good, or that emanates from good, rather than 
"the soul of goodness in things evil." But it has 
pleased me better, looking at the wrong side of the 
stuff, to show that it has a right — to turn it with its 
bright smooth surface uppermost — than to say 
anything disparaging of it because there are frayed 
ends and unevennesses beneath. Whether this be 
the truer philosophy or not, I do not pretend to 



J48 THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

determine ; but I am very certain that it is the 
pleasanter and the more encouraging. And may 
we not thus, looking at the matter in this more 
cheerful aspect, find that from the very mode and 
manner of our investigation there are special truths 
to be learnt ; that there are some good practical 
lessons in it which we should do well not to ignore. 
Morally, it is right that we should judge people 
according to their opportunities. Legally, of course, 
we can take account only of results. Now, the 
results of being dragged tip are, doubtless, very 
lamentable. They are apparent in frequent ap- 
peals to the legal tribunals of the country. Under 
such adverse circumstances, good is very difficult 
to maintain as good. It is speedily perverted into 
evil. There stands the prisoner in the dock, — a 
ruffian and a thief, — with previous convictions 
written down against him. His has been the 
education of the gutter. We say it is a " hopeless 
case." But who knows that still some germ of good 
may not lurk in the secret places of his nature, 
to be called forth again, in all its freshness and 
vitality, under wise treatment and fostering care ? 

If we look well into it, we may find that we 
have not to contend with some dominant sin, but 



ENCOURAGING TREATMENT. 149 

with the misdirection of some originally good 
quality — that the wrong side of the stuff has 
turned up very early in life and obstinately re- 
mained uppermost. If we are satisfied of this, we 
may find the work of reformation comparatively 
easy. I have often thought that we take too much 
trouble to find out the dark spots, and, having 
found them, to cut them out with the knife. If 
we could only chance upon the bright ones, our 
treatment would be more simple and more plea- 
sant. There may be, we say, beneath them — 
who knows ? — a pure fount of good, from which 
may flow rivers of living waters. Let us make 
a channel for the stream, so that it shall pour 
itself in the right direction, and go rippling over 
golden sands and clean smooth pebbles, not 
slushing through mud and garbage. That young 
Arab cowering under a dry arch, — there has been 
nothing but the wrong side of the stuff for him all 
his life. Can we expect him to be any better 
than he is ? But, peradventure, there is some 
humanity in him, if we could only find it out. 
And that seemingly still more hopeless subject — 
that hoary sinner, blear-eyed and of Vesuvian 
aspect, reeling out of the gin-shop, with inarticu- 



ISO THE WRONG SIDE OF THE STUFF. 

late blasphemies in his scorched throat — he too 
may have some good in him ; and, if we could only 
find it out, he would not be wholly lost. Men 
even in that state have been saved ere now, by an 
appeal, perchance Heaven-directed, to some feeling 
of honour and decency still alive, though long 
dormant, in their bosoms. "You may not believe 
it, but I was a gentleman once — I was, indeed ! " — 
— or words of kindred meaning — said Newman 
Noggs ; and there was pride in the thought which 
lifted a corner of the tapestry, and revealed for a 
time the right side of the stuff. There is some- 
thing to work upon when you have found the soft 
spot. A sweet sound, a pleasant sight, will do 
more than the chain or the lash to subdue the 
maniac to quietude ; and a succession of sweet 
sounds and pleasant sights may bring him back 
to reason, which we may be sure the whip and 
the strait - waistcoat never will. And this is 
mainly because these sweet sights, these pleasant 
sounds supply, as it were, the long-broken link 
between the present and the past, and bring back 
lost remembrances of peace and happiness in the 
antecedent state. And by the same power of 
association, men, whose moral sense is overcast, 



THE RIGHT SIDE. 



151 



may be brought back to commune with themselves 
as they once were — may see glimmerings of bygone 
beatitudes, and be purified and humanized by the 
glimpses they have caught of a holier state of 
existence once theirs. If we can only succeed in 
turning up a corner, a very little corner of the 
right side of the stuff, there is good hope that 
we may soon see it lifted by the mild breath 
of favourable circumstance, rolling over, fold 
after fold, until we can no longer see anything 
of the wrong. 



{July, 1 86 1.] 



( 152 ) 



ON GROWING OLD. 




AM growing old. 

I do not mean that I am bed-ridden 
or chair-ridden ; that I am blind, or lame, 
or deaf. I read without spectacles, and I walk my 
four miles under the hour without fatigue. But for 
all that, there are many things which say that age is 
creeping upon me. I have left off pulling the grey 
hairs out of my whiskers. I am glad when any 
one helps me on with my great-coat. I go to 
sleep at the Play. I have had a sharp touch of 
gout ; and I saw myself described, the other day, 
in print, not unkindly, as a " literary veteran." So 
I suppose that I am a veteran ; and I have been 
just thinking how I like it. 

According to all received opinions, I ought not 
to like it at all. I ought to feel very sad and 
serious over my lost youth. It is certain that it 



ACCEPTING THE POSITION. 153 

will never come back again. Once gone, it is gone 
for ever. I know that ; 

" Nothing can bring back the hour 
Of glory to the grass, of splendour to the flower." 

The verdant, grassy, flowery state has lapsed into 
the great limbo of the Past. It has become a 
reminiscence. Am I therefore to bewail it ; or 
is it wiser to accept the situation ? Accept it ! 
ay, and more than that — accept and be grateful 
for it, throwing up my magnificats in full faith that 
if the glory and the splendour have departed, new 
glories and new splendours have taken their place. 
It is a very pleasant thought that Life is made 
up of compensations. All Nature teaches this one 
grand lesson. There is seed-time, and there is 
summer. There is harvest, and there is winter. 
When autumn comes upon us — when the roses 
have long since gone, and the leaves on the trees 
are sere and yellow — are we to regret that it is no 
longer summer and that the greenery has departed ? 
Have not the rich tints of the autumnal foliage 
peculiar beauties of their own ? As time takes 
away, so it gives ; as it empties, so it replenishes. 
There is a process of restoration and compensation 
ever at work in the physical world ; and is it not so 



154 ON GROWING OLD. 

also in the moral ? You have lost a parent, but you 
have gained a child. Do you not see revived in 
your daughter the calm, clear brow, and the sweet, 
mild eyes of your mother, as you last saw her, when 
you were a little child ? You must not expect to 
enjoy at the same time the beatitudes of the Past 
and of the Present. But I am afraid that there 
are some whose nature it is rather to deplore 
what they have lost, than to rejoice in what they 
have gained. They say that " the beautiful has 
vanished, and returns not ; " instead of believing 
in the great truth that it is continually recreating 
and renewing itself. 

And after all, what is it that we lose by growing 
old ? Is it much more than the fruit loses when it 
ripens. We lose our greenness — our rawness — our 
crudeness — and surely maturity is better than 
these. But maturity, it is said, is the forerunner 
of decay. Well, O Wiseman ! what then ? It was 
one wiser than thou, albeit a heathen teacher, who 
said, in venerable Sanskrit — 

" Weep not ! Life the hired nurse is, holding us a little space ; 
Death, the mother, who does take us back into our proper place." 

This from the Book of Good Counsels, O Wiseman ! 
— known to Orientalists as the Hitopadesa — written 



TERRORS OF CHILDHOOD. 155 

centuries before we had even the glimmer of a 
literature of our own. But let us look at the 
matter less seriously, thinking, first of all, what 
maturity replaces. We all know how fond are 
the poets and romancers of discoursing upon the 
joyousness, the insouciance of youth ; but we hear 
little of its embarrassments, its anxieties, its morti- 
fications. If there be one faith more blindly 
accepted than all others by the world, it is that 
freedom from care and trouble are the blissful 
immunities of childhood and early youth ; that 
these burdens increase in volume and press more 
heavily upon us as we advance in years, and are 
grievous only in the maturity and the decay of 
our lives. If children were to write essays and 
truthfully to record their experiences, 1 have very 
little doubt as to what they w r ould say upon this 
subject And I believe, too, that the testimony of 
very many grown-up men, looking back through 
a vista of thirty or forty years, would be very 
conclusive against the carelessness and light- 
headedness of childhood. In the ordinary com- 
merce of adult life, there is probably nothing half 
so distressing as the night-fears of the young — the 
horrible dread of solitude and darkness, which 



156 ON GROWING OLD. 

crushes the childish heart. There are some 
sensitive and excitable children whose lives are 
embittered by these vague apprehensions of night 
dangers, of which ghosts and thieves are the most 
tremendous, for all the latter part of each day is 
overclouded by the dreadful shadow of approach- 
ing bedtime. A great deal might be said — and, 
indeed, a great deal has been said, in divers places, 
very much to the point — about want of care in 
nurses, and want of judgment in parents, but I am 
not writing to expose omissions or to suggest 
remedies, but simply to state facts — and the 
nursery horrors of which I speak are very grave 
facts — grave even in the retrospect. Yet we talk 
about the cloudless happiness of childhood as 
though children never knew a care. 

And has schoolboy life no cares, no anxieties, 
no terrors ? There is the big bully, or the trucu- 
lent usher, or the fellow you ought to fight and yet 
can't quite bring yourself to do it ; the debt to the 
itinerant pastrycook of which he reminds you with 
an indelicacy of which in after-life your tailor is 
quite incapable ; the prize worked for, toiled for, 
with vast brain-sweat, and mighty sacrifice of self, 
grand heroic surrender even of the pleasures and 



SORROWS OF BOYHOOD. 157 

privileges of fine weather and the cricket-season, 
and yet not gained after all. And even that 
cricket-season, has it not its own peculiar crop 
of bitterness ? A bad innings sends many a fellow 
unhappy to bed. On grand occasions, such as that 
half-yearly " match with the town," a disaster of this 
kind is pure wretchedness for a fortnight ; ay, and 
for longer, if the holidays do not charitably intervene. 
I doubt whether the fates have anything half so 
bitter as this in store for our later days. To be 
booked, by the general voice of the school, as good 
at least for thirty runs, and to go out, branded, 
disgraced, with that terrible round O to your 
name. The dreadful feeling of descent and 
humiliation ; the knowledge that you have dis- 
appointed your friends, and given a triumph to 
your enemies ; the self-reproach, the self-contempt, 
with which you are burdened, as though you had 
really been only an impostor : they are truly such 
tremendous inflictions that the wonder is that you 
make your crest-fallen way to the tent, and do not 
utterly perish before the next boy has taken your 
place. Talk of the elasticity of youth, how soon 
does the schoolboy recover from that round O ? 
How soon does he regain his serenity of mind after 



153 ON GROWING OLD, 

missing that catch at cover-point which would have 
extinguished the Town's best man, and turned the 
tide of victory in favour of the School ? Talk of 
the generosity of youth ! In the agony of his own 
humiliation, what boy so generous as to desire his 
successor at the wicket to attach a large score to his 
name ? Does not his heart warm to the fellow who 
surrenders like himself to the first ball ? Well, as we 
grow older, we doubtless have our failures, our 
distresses, our envies, and our jealousies ; and I am 
not now saying that in adult life we may be bowled 
out first ball with perfect composure. Spoken 
literally, it might not be to the point ; meta- 
phorically, it might not be true. All I mean to 
say is that there are few keener mortifications — 
few so difficult to bear — as those which beset us in 
early life, and that this kind of juvenile bank- 
ruptcy preys upon the spirits and really w r ears 
the heart with an attrition as great as that which 
far greater failures subject us to in after life. It 
is very w r ell to say, " What does it matter — a boy 
may be a very good boy, and yet may fail to 
defend his wicket, and may add nothing to the 
score ? " But is his reputation no matter ? Is it 
nothing that the hero-worship, which once attended 



BO Y1SH IMPOSTORS. 1 59 

him, has gone down with his stumps ? In school- 
boy life there are no sets-off and compensations as 
there are in after years, and there is no philosophy 
to make the most of them if there were. A 
hundred — perhaps, five hundred — young hearts 
have suddenly cooled towards their idol, and come, 
in a moment, to regard it as an empty and pre- 
tentious sham. 

We talk of the simplicity, the singleness, the 
transparent truth of boyhood ; but there are no such 
arrant impostors as boys. They go through all 
sorts of penances — martyrdoms, almost — just for 
the sake of appearances. I remember now, with a 
feeling of wonder, the things which we used to do 
in mere boastfulness — things that we would have 
fain left undone, but that we thought it "fine" to 
do them. What braggart absurdities we committed 
in those days, with inward fear and trembling ! 
What would induce us, in later life, to go through 
such self-incurred punishments ? Even those 
school-feasts of which we talked so much before- 
hand were terrible inflictions when the time came. 
We went to bed at eight or nine o'clock, and the 
feast could not come off until the doctor and his 
family were in bed. So we kept ourselves awake, 



i6o ON GROWING OLD. 

struggling against the inroads of sleep, till near 
midnight (taking it, perhaps, in turns to watch for 
an hour), weary, hungry, and a-thirst, wishing 
heartily that the veal-pies and lobsters, the port- 
wine, or the ingredients of punch, were anywhere 
but behind our beds. When the time came for 
eating, we had generally passed the esurient stage, 
and the promised enjoyment was flat and feeble. 
We lived in perpetual fear of being u caught out," 
and sometimes we were. Anyhow, we were ex- 
ceedingly sick next morning (and, perhaps, for some 
days afterwards), and would have been very sorry 
for what we had done, if it had not been for the 
pleasure of talking about " such fun." There was 
an ingenious process of substituting removable 
screws for the nails which kept the wooden panels, 
of which the walls of our room were constructed — 
a process which enabled us to go into the town at 
night, when we were supposed to be asleep ; a per- 
formance which was considered the very height of 
puerile daring. I remember that the audacity of 
myself and an adventurous comrade culminated in 
a visit to the theatre, half-price, when we sat in 
the dress-circle, and witnessed the last act of Jane 
Shore and an after-piece. I was exceedingly glad 



JUVENILE AUDACITIES. 161 

to find myself in bed again, but I was proud of the 
feat next morning. It was an immense sacrifice of 
the Present to the Future. And when I think over 
it now, I am inclined to think that it is out of 
such sacrifices as this that our maturer heroism 
arises. I wonder whether any one who volunteers 
for a forlorn hope ever likes it. In the schoolboy 
freaks of which I have spoken, we had no sustaining 
sense of duty ; what we did was precisely the 
reverse of our duty, but we were equally eager for 
the applause of our comrades. If we would rather 
remain in bed, at fourteen, perhaps we would rather 
remain in camp at two-and-twenty ; but we do not. 
For the love of glory takes us out of our security 
and impels us to do what is dangerous and dis- 
tasteful to us. I do not, therefore, say that even 
these puerile audacities have not their uses ; there 
are the germs of better things in them. But when 
we set these things down among the pleasures of 
youth, and talk of its sincerity and truthfulness, 
I cannot help thinking that we succumb to a vague 
tradition. One of the great advantages of age is 
that we are not wont to disturb ourselves by doing 
things that we do not like, simply for the look of 
the thing. When a friend takes me* into his stables 

II 



1 62 ON GROWING OLD. 

and, pointing out a spindle-legged, vicious-eyed 
mare, who sets her ears back at the sight of me, 
and tells me I shall ride her to-morrow, do I mind 
saying, "No, thank you!"? But, when I was a 
stripling, I would have mounted a flying dragon, had 
one been offered to me, and professed a liking for 
that sort of cattle. There are, doubtless, some men 
who never outlive their vanity. There was my old 

school-fellow, C S , a year or two my 

senior, who never could shake off the boastfulness 
of his youth. Endeavouring not long ago, in the 
presence of myself and others, to witch us with his 
noble horsemanship, he sprang upon the back of 
his charger with such a show of juvenile agility 
that, like vaulting ambition, he overleapt himself, 
and fell on the other side, flat on his face. If one 
of my boys had done that, I should have been sorry 
for him ; but, in my schoolfellow, I could not help 
thinking that he was old enough to know better. 
Such follies and failures, however, are only the 
exceptions which prove the rule. 

But of all the different seasons of life, I believe 
that which is most laden with its own peculiar 
distresses is the season of incipient manhood. 
The sensitiveness of hobbledehoyism is very afflict- 



H OBBLEDEHO 1 r ISM. i C 3 

ing. I have heard it said that all this has passed 
away — that times are changed, that youth is 
changed with them, and that the rising genera- 
tion are distinguished by an amount of cool 
assurance to which, a quarter of a century ago, 
striplinghood was utterly a stranger. I do not 
undertake to settle this point. Possibly, it may be 
so. Possibly the cool assurance of which we hear 
so much is but the outward cloak of that real want 
of self-reliance — of that nervous uncertainty, which 
is the normal state of those who have not yet 
secured their position. The very bluster of youth 
has something of timidity in it. I know, at least, 
it had in my time, a quarter of a century ago. 
What agonies I endured in that state of adoles- 
cence. What fearful turmoils of the mind there 
were, what fears, what fightings, on that terrible 
bridge which unites the opposite banks of boyhood 
and manhood — when, to speak without a metaphor, 
you do not like to be thought a boy, whilst others 
are scarcely minded to treat you as a man. There 
are some who may laugh at this. I vow that there 
is nothing to me laughable in the recollection. 
The sufferings of hobbledehoyism have been set 
forth with pathetic humour, in the persons of 



1 64 ON GROWING OLD. 

David Copperfield and Pip of the Great Expecta- 
tions, with a fidelity which vividly recalls my own 
miserable experiences on the bridge. In those 
days, with an insane ambition, one went in for 
everything. If one could have limited one's 
aspirations, it would have been comparatively a 
light matter to be dragged up into manhood. 
But with the unlimited assumptions of youth, what 
roughnesses have to be encountered. You wish 
to be accounted handsome, well-dressed, well- 
mannered, well-informed, active, brave, clever, a 
fellow who fears nothing, who can do anything, 
and who knows everything in the world. In after 
life, you know that pretentiousness of this kind has 
its own death-warrant written on its forehead. 
But very young men never acknowledge ignorance 
or incapacity. Their struggles to maintain a 
character for manhood are painful in the extreme. 
They do not know that the manliest thing of all is 
to keep quiet. It is their misfortune to be restless 
and uneasy. The fact is, that the world being all 
new and strange to them, they cannot help think- 
ing that they are new and strange in the eyes of 
the world, and that therefore the world is con- 
tinually looking at them instead of treating them 



JUVENILE ANXIETIES. 165 

with the most sovereign indifference and cold- 
blooded unconcern. That pimple on your chin, 
Juvenis, has made you unhappy for a week. You 
have looked at it every morning on first getting 
up. I will not say what you have done to 
diminish its size and its rubicundity, only in- 
creasing the evil by every new effort to remove 
it ; and yet no one has observed that pimple on 
your chin — no one certainly has given a thought 
to it. And that untoward splash on your white 
neckcloth, dinner-bound, which makes you vow 
never to travel, en costume, in Hansom again — 
who sees the spot, and who would concern him- 
self about it if he did ? Not men who have 
got dinners to eat, or girls to flirt with, or 
anecdotes t<5 ventilate with effect. Take it as a 
rule, O Juvenis, that we are all of us thinking 
about ourselves a great deal too much to think 
about you. You talk : you wish to display your 
knowledge, and you make a slip. You find it out 
yourself, and you are unhappy. You have an 
uneasy conception of the blunder almost as soon 
as you have made it ; you are out in your geo- 
graphy, or your history, or you have given a 
wrong date ; you consult a score of volumes when 



1 66 ON GROWING OLD. 

you get home, find that you really have blundered, 
and are miserable for a week under the impression 
that you have irremediably damaged your reputa- 
tion, and henceforth will be accounted an ass. You 
have found yourself out, my friend ; but take my 
word for it, no one else has found you out ; no one 
has discovered your blunder or given you and your 
talk a second thought. But we are not easily 
taught that however much we may think about 
ourselves, other people think very little about us ; 
and that in most cases we make no more impression 
on society than a snow-flake on a tablet of stone. 

This continual struggle about what others will 
think of you, this incessant inquietude concerning 
trifles is, I repeat, one of the main unhappinesses 
peculiar to youth. We gain our experience, even 
in the smallest matters, after much perturbation of 
spirit — much sore and grievous travail. I remember 
that when I first began to pay visits by myself, just 
after leaving school, I was terribly disquieted by 
the agonizing uncertainty as to what I ought to 
say to the servant who opened the door. . The great 
question, concerning which there were such inward 
conflicts throughout the journey, was whether I 
ought to say, " Is Mr. Robinson at home ? " or, " Is 



VANITY OF YOUTH. 167 

your master at home?" The only thing I cared 
to know was which was the most manly, man-about- 
town form of question to be addressed to the foot- 
man or the parlour-maid on opening the door. Of 
course, I only thought about myself, for the vanity 
of youth is egregiously selfish. I know, at all 
events, now, which is the form of question most 
pleasing to the door-opener ; and I am quite con- 
tent with that knowledge. It may be inquired, 
why should youth suffer itself to be made wretched 
by such doubts as these (and I have only cited 
one of many familiar illustrations that might be 
adduced), when it is so easy, in any circumstance 
of life, to ask some one older and more experienced 
than yourself, what is the right thing to do ? A 
man who reasons in this wise can never have been 
young. " Easy ! " Why, it is in youth the hardest 
thing in the world. Does youth ever confess igno- 
rance — ever ask advice ? It would rather die first! 
You or I may smile to see our boys assume the 
veteran air, and do things for the first time with an 
assumption of experience, as though they had been 
doing the same thing all their lives. But, if we 
look to our own early days, the feeling will be 
rather one of pity than amusement, for we shall 



1 68 ON GROWING OLD. 

remember how we ourselves suffered in this transi- 
tion state, when we wore the toga virilis with a 
jaunty air, as though we were used to it, and it 
was continually tripping us up. 

There is absolute misery in pretentiousness of 
all kinds, and youth is infinitely more pretentious 
than age. There are some men, I have said, who 
never outlive their vanity ; but, as a general rule, it 
may be maintained that the longer we live the less 
we care what others think of us, and the less we 
strive after effect. I do not mean to say that in 
these strivings of youth there may not be some- 
thing good and noble — "strivings, because our 
nature is to strive." They are the outward expres- 
sion of what the same poet * calls " our inborn, 
uninstructed impulses " — the tentative, experi- 
mental action of powers immature and undecided. 
A young man feels that he has something in him, 
and, not knowing in what form Providence designs 
that it shall come forth, he is continually making 
outlets for it, first in one direction, then in another, 
as though the whole circle of human knowledge 
were not too vast for his intellectual exploration. 
We are often, therefore, astounded by the ambition 
* Robert Browning in Paracelsus. 



LIMITATIONS OF KNOWLEDGE. 169 

of youth; but we ought not to be offended by it. 
It is sure to bring its own punishment. To sow in 
vanity is to reap in mortification. We learn, in 
time, how little we can ever know, and how ridicu- 
lous we make ourselves by pretending to know 
everything. When a man has learnt to say, " I 
am as ignorant as a child on this or that subject ; " 
or, "as powerless as a baby to do this or that 
thing," he has mastered one of the great difficulties 
of life ; he has entered upon a new stage of his 
career. If, however, he says it boastingly, scorn- 
fully, he is a greater fool than if he pretended to 
know, and to be able to do, everything. To affect 
to consider the knowledge or the power, which one 
has not attained, not worth possessing is simply to 
write oneself an ass. There is no need, on the 
other hand, of any great parade of humility. You 
are a man. Be thankful for it. It is no humiliation 
that you are not a god. If your neighbour knows 
what you do not know, and can do what you can- 
not do, the chances are that you know and can do 
some things which are out of the circle of his 
potentiality. You do not know one star from the 
other, but you can put the Sakoontala into Greek 
verse. You do not know the principle of the 



i7o ON GROWING OLD, 

diving-bell, but you could fortify a city in accord- 
ance with the system of Cormantagne. You can- 
not ride across country to hounds, but you can 
take a round or two with the gloves with Jem 
Mace, and not have a worse appetite for your 
dinner. Be content, then ; turn what you know 
and what you can do to the best possible account ; 
and be neither elated because you know so much, 
nor depressed because you know so little. 

If contentment of this kind contributes, as I 
believe it very greatly does, to our happiness, Age 
has a vast advantage over Youth. The great lesson 
of life, the one of all others best worth learning, is 
that which teaches us thoroughly to appreciate the 
fact of the little that we know. This is a lesson 
which no young person has ever yet learnt. There 
is no royal road to it. We come upon it, after a 
long journey and after sore travail, foot-sore, sun- 
burnt, w T ind-stained, and bramble-torn. There is 
infinite satisfaction in it, when we acquire it at last. 
I came upon the great fact the other day, so 
quaintly and pleasantly put, that it made me happy 
for some time, almost beyond precedent — " Man is 
necessarily so much of a fool, that it would be a 
species of folly not to be a fool!' It is Philosopher 



SMA TTE RINGS. 1 7 1 

Pascal who writes this. As soon as ever you have 
made up your mind that you are a fool, and that 
it is altogether out of nature not to be a fool, a 
measureless calm descends upon you. The con- 
viction, however, that, at the best, you are a very 
poor creature, need not prevent you from diligently 
striving to make yourself less poor. There are 
degrees of folly — different kinds of fools ; and 
though the greatest of all is he who thinketh him- 
self wise, not far behind him is he who does not 
strive to make himself as wise as he can. All 
knowledge is of high worth, let a man but know it 
well. A " smattering " of this or that is not to be 
despised. " A little learning," say for example, of 
surgery, may be the very reverse of rt dangerous." 
The principle of the tourniquet, applied in the 
improvised shape of a pocket-handkerchief, has ere 
now saved a man from bleeding to death. But I • 
believe we are of most use to our fellows by apply- 
ing our little intellect to the mastery of some one 
subject. The word mastery must be understood 
only in a limited sense ; for true it is, as Pascal 
justly philosophizes, that no man can know all that 
is to be known about any one subject, let him give 
his whole life to the study. 



172 ON GROWING OLD. 

But still he may, as I have sard, know quite 
enough of his one subject to make him very useful 
to his fellows, whilst it is the veriest accident if any 
one of his numerous smatterings is turned to pro-, 
fitable account. If a man devotes his life to the 
study of pin-making, and makes better pins than 
all the rest of the world, he by no means lives an 
unprofitable life. A pin is a very small thing. It 
is, indeed, a symbol of worthlessness. A " pin's 
fee " is held to be next to nothing. But civilized 
Humanity cannot do without pins ; and the inven- 
tor of a new pin — say, for example, a pin that will 
fasten without pricking or scratching- — would be 
fairly entitled to take rank among the benefactors of 
mankind. A button, too, is another little thing — 
"Not worth a button" is an expression of con- 
tempt. But to invent a really serviceable button 
would be a great effort of humanity — a button 
that will not play at " fast-and-loose," but will hold 
fast, with an abiding sense of the purpose for which 
it was invented. What agonies have we all endured 
for want of such a button ! I would gladly send 
my modest contribution towards a public testi- 
monial in honour of the inventor of a really service- 
able button. Any one who does something better 



NARROW SYMPATHIES. 173 

than every one else is to be accounted one of the 
men of the age ; whilst your would-be admirable 
Crichtons, who squander their strength on many 
vain things, are condemned to rot on Lethe's 
wharf, as utterly unprofitable servants. 

But we must take care that this concentration 
of ourselves does not betray us into an error to 
which, I am afraid, our natural egotism is prone. 
I have glanced at this above, but it demands more 
than a passing allusion. We must take care that 
we do not come in time so to narrow our sympa- 
thies, by continually dwelling upon our pins and 
our buttons, as to believe that the world has 
nothing else worth living for — that mankind is 
divided into only two races of men, the makers 
and the consumers of pins and buttons, and that 
all beyond the great material fact of pindom and 
buttondom is mere surplusage and refuse. Your 
calling may be something higher than that of 
making pins and buttons, or you may think that it 
is, — still, your egotism is equally absurd. Was the 
world made only that you should take cities, 
or discover comets, or put odds and ends of mor- 
tality together as the framework of extinct mam- 
malia ? You may not quite think that ; but you 



174 ON GROWING '- OLD. 

may err after a like fashion, though not in the same 
degree. It is the commonest thing for men to 
attach undue importance to their own pursuits, 
and in like proportion to undervalue, somewhat 
scornfully perhaps, the pursuits of others. It is a 
foolish, small-minded thing to do, and the meaner 
the occupation is, I am inclined to think, the 
greater the store that is set by it. No honest 
occupation is in itself mean ; but some pursuits 
are doubtless less ennobling than others : and 
money-making, for the mere sake of making 
money, is not, perhaps, the very highest. Now 
you will find that the conversation of men, whose 
main object in life it is to make money, runs 
continually upon this one subject, or is interlarded 
with references to it. I confess that when I ask 
about this or that man, I do not, as a matter of 
course, wish to be told " what he is worth " — worth 
in this case representing the money value of the 
man and nothing else. When I was a younger 
man than I am now, these utterly irrelevant allu- 
sions to the length of a man's purse put me sorely 
out of temper. But this was a mistake upon my 
part, almost as great as that which so much an- 
noyed me. What right had I to be annoyed ? I 






RESPECT FOR MONEY. 175 

can hear men talk now-a-days about money- 
making without any feeling of contempt. When I 
ask about Mr. Brown, or Sir John Jones, wishing 
to know what sort of neighbour he is, whether he 
is hospitable and liberal, whether he gives to the 
poor, whether he is well-read, well-informed, a 
scholar, and a gentleman, I confess that I do not 
much care to be told that he has 12,000/. a year 
landed property, or that he made half a million by 
railway contracts. But why should I go fuming 
and fretting and blustering to myself all the way 
home, and vowing that I will never dine with 
Nummosus again, because he will apply the money 
standard to everything, and talk as though there 
were nothing but £ s. d. in the world ? It is 
foolish, I say, in him to talk in this strain- — but it 
is more foolish in me to be vexed about it. Num- 
mosus is an excellent fellow — "warm" too ; he 
knows what he is talking about. And who am I 
that I should go gasconading after this fashion, and 
endeavouring to persuade myself that the money 
element has nothing to do with it ? If there be 
one thing which we are all sure to learn by growing 
old, it is that the money element has everything to 
do with it. I was shocked when I was a young 



i/6 ON GROWING OLD. 

man, because the first question asked, in my 
presence, on the arrival of news of a great fire, 
was whether the buildings and contents were 
insured. No thought of human life, of homes 
made desolate, of wives made widows, of children 
fatherless, disturbed the hearts of the inquirers. I 
do not expect now, in such a case, to hear any 
other question. I have just read, in Beamish's 
Life of Isambard Brunei, that when news was 
brought to him that his Battersea Sawmills were 
burnt down, his only question was, " Is any one 
hurt ? " Nummosus will tell you, perhaps, that 
the works were well insured. I will not so read 
the anecdote of the great engineer — but I am 
afraid that it must be regarded as an exceptional 
manifestation of humanity, and that material 
property, for the most part, enters into the calcu- 
lation long before human life. 

But I have been led by all this out of the line 
which I had purposed to follow. I desired to show 
that one of the great advantages of mature life is, 
that we cease from those strivings after the mastery 
of many things which end in disappointment and 
mortification ; that we learn to measure our own 
powers aright ; to know how little we can do ; how 



SELF-RELIANCE OF AGE. J 77 

small the space we occupy in the world. I do not 
know that there is anything in the delusions of 
youth which contributes so much to happiness as 
this power of self-measurement, and the calm self- 
reliance which attends it. 

" Youth is soon gone — but why lament its going ? 
What we were once we cannot always be. 
Change is the law of life ; the seasons three, 
Each after each, of man's great year, of sowing, 
Of reaping, and of gathering into store, 
Follow each other quick. Men say we lose, 
As we ascend life's green hill-side, much more 
Than we can ever gain, and oft deplore 
* Their youth and their brave hopes all dead and gone. ' 
Yet would I, were the offer made, refuse, 
As one content to reap what he has sown, 
To give for youth, with all its hopes and fears, 
Its restless yearnings after things unknown, 
The self-reliance of maturer years ? " 

I cannot say how thoroughly my own heart echoes 
all this. When you know what you can do and 
what you cannot do — what you are and what 
you are not — the voyage of life is comparatively 
smooth sailing. You cease to be disturbed by vain 
anxieties and restless discontents. You may have 
failed, or you may have succeeded ; but, anyhow, be 
it success or be it failure, it is a fait accompli ; you 
accept your position, and you are, at all events, 

12 



178 ON GROWING OLD, 

tranquil. It is with life in the aggregate as with 
the separate incidents of life. You may get rid 
of a disturbing impression — of a painful anxiety 
with respect to something of a vague and uncer- 
tain issue, by passing over all the intermediate 
lesser stages of evil, and looking the worst possible 
contingency in the face. The inspired writer, in 
that grand old epic known as the Book of Job, 
wishing to describe a vision of the night supremely 
terrible and awe-inspiring, makes the patriarch to 
say that he " could not discern the shape thereof." 
The spectral horror culminated in the indistinct- 
ness of the thing. So is it in the ordinary affairs 
of life. It is the formless and conjectural that 
disturb us. Failure itself is far better than the 
fear of failure. We can reconcile ourselves to it 
when it comes. But the common lot of life is 
neither to succeed nor to fail, but to hit the line of 
mediocrity, half-way between success and failure. 
Whatever it may be, the only real wisdom and the 
only real happiness consists in reconciling yourself 
to it, with boundless faith that it is all right. As 
long as, having the third or fourth place, you 
believe that you ought to have the first or second, 
you are a wretch, and there is no peace for you. 



SENSITIVENESS. 1 79 

Bat men who have lived forty or fifty years in the 
world, have generally had this sort of nonsense 
knocked out of them. They have, for the most 
part, learnt to believe, what young men are very 
prone to deny, that the world is, on the w T hole, 
tolerably just to its inmates, and that most men 
get pretty well what they deserve. Neglected 
merit is, in reality, a much rarer thing than at 
the outset of life we believe. At five-and-twenty, 
a man often thinks that all the world is in a con- 
spiracy against him. At five-and-forty, he acknow- 
ledges that the only conspirators have been his 
indolence and his incapacity, — or, perhaps, his pre- 
sumption and self-conceit. He ceases then to 
give way to vain repinings, and humbly, thankfully 
acknowledges that his slender merits have met 
with ample reward. 

I heard it said, not long ago, by a man whose 
opinion I very much respect, that in the maturity 
of our years we are much more impressionable, 
much more easily stabbed and lacerated by external 
circumstances, and that our wounds much less readily 
heal, than in the elastic season of youth. I cannot 
say how heartily I dissent from this as a general 
proposition. It is not to be denied that if a man 



i8o ON GROWING OLD. 

of fifty is fairly knocked down on the road of life, he 
does not pick himself up so readily as a man of 
five-and-twenty. But these knock-down blows are 
very rarely delivered. Life is made up of small 
joys and small sorrows ; and the longer we live, 
the better we learn not to disturb ourselves about 
trifles. A man who has fought the battle of life — 
who has encountered some stern realities in the 
course of his career — is not very likely to suffer 
himself to be made wretched by imaginary evils. 
Above all, as I have before said, he is not, as 
inexperience is, continually fretted by the thought 
of what others are thinking of him. He is assured 
of his position. He knows what it is, and whence 
it is derived, and he does not disturb himself about 
circumstances which do not really affect it. And 
so with regard to the real evils of life ; with an 
increase of years comes an increase of faith — we 
have somehow or other, even when our troubles 
are at the worst, an assured conviction that we 
shall surmount them. The past gives us confi- 
dence in the future. We have lived down other 
troubles, and shall we not live down these ? So I 
think that whilst in advanced years we are much 
less prone than in youth to disturb ourselves about 



IX CREASE OF FAITH. 1S1 

imaginary evils, we have far more strength to 
contend with real ones, and far more faith to live 
them down. It will be suggested, perhaps, that 
over and above all this, there is the fact that we 
grow case-hardened — that the continual attrition 
of trouble renders us less sensitive, less alive to 
its influence. But I would fain take a higher view 
of the matter than this ; and believe that the large , 
and sustaining patience of maturer years proceeds 
from an increased knowledge of ourselves and an 
increased faith in the goodness of God. 

And it is this knowledge, this faith, which leads , 
us to cease from all vague repinings and regrets. 
It is hard to say how much misery men make for 
themselves by lamenting either that circumstances 
had not worked differently for their good, or that 
they themselves had not done differently. But, 
in all probability, the circumstances which we 
deplore are just those w T hich have most contributed 
to our advancement ; and that the way in which 
we have gone about our work is the only one in 
which we could have done it at all. To take the 
illustration that comes most readily — a mean and 
familiar one, perhaps, but sufficiently suggestive, — 
am I, when I have finished this essay, to regret 



1 82 ON GROWING OLD, 

that I did not write it in a different way — that I 
did not apply myself more steadily and perse- 
veringly to it — never once turning aside or suffering 
myself to be distracted from my work, instead of " 
getting up every five minutes, going to the window, 
strolling into another room, drawing faces on the 
blotting-paper, reading the newspaper, and de- 
viating into other irregularities. Of what use is it 
to say that I should have written the essay sooner, 
and that it would have been much better when 
written, if I had done none of these things ? I 
have the profoundest possible conviction that I 
could not have done it in any other way. 

" I am broken and trained 
To my old habits. They are part of me." 

So, too, in the larger concerns of life, we may be 
sure that our way of doing our work is a part of 
ourselves, that we could not have done otherwise, 
any more than w r e could have been otherwise — 
taller, stronger, or cleverer than w r e are. 

And then as to repinings — vain, idle complaints 
that circumstances have not been favourable to us ; 
that if this or that thing had not happened, how 
different 'it would have been ! Ay, different ! But 
let it not be assumed that to be different is to be 



ALL FOR THE BEST, 183 

better. One of the lessons which we learn by . 
growing old is that all things work together, not 
for evil, but for good. Let us think calmly and 
quietly over the reverses which we have sustained 
at different periods of our lives ; of the disappoint- 
ments which we have encountered ; of accidents, 
which, at the time of their occurrence, we considered 
to be gigantic calamities. How small they appear 
even in themselves, looking at them as we approach 
the summit of the hill of life. But think of them in 
connection with later events and with our present 
position, and the chances are that w T e shall come to 
recognize them as " blessings in disguise." I heard 
only last night of a man who owed everything to a 
heavy blow in early life. He w ? ished, when he 
married, to insure his life, but the Offices rejected 
him. This made him careful and thriftv ; and the 
end was that he died at the age of eighty-five, 
worth a quarter of a million. It will be often thus. 
By some grand reverse of fortune, in our boyhood, 
perhaps, we were left to struggle broad-breasted 
against the stream of life, instead of quietly floating 
down with the current : we were cast upon our own 
resources, compelled to put forth our own strength, 
with nothing to aid us but our God-given manhood, 



1 34 ON GROWING OLD. 

and lo ! the result. Are we not wiser, greater, 
perhaps richer, for the reverse which in early youth 
we so often lamented ? I speak only in the plain, 
sober, demonstrable language of truth, when I say 
that I owe everything, humanly speaking, that 
makes life dear to me, to a reverse of fortune in 
my boyhood. Hard work has been my heritage. 
I shudder to think what I might have been if 
existence had gone more smoothly with me — if 
action had not encountered passion in the great 
battle of life ; in a word, if I had had more leisure 
to be wicked. It is a common case. Our very 
misfortunes save us. It may seem very hard at 
the time. Some one has got our heritage, as far 
as money makes heritages, and we bewail our 
miserable lot ; but there is one heritage to which 
no man can play the part of Jacob, and be even 
once a supplanter — the heritage of our own strong 
arm, or our own strong brain. To be " lord of our- 
selves " is not to have " a heritage of woe." The 
real heritage of woe is not to be lord of ourselves, 
but to be lorded over by wealth, by luxury, or by 
pride. If a man is really lord of himself, there is 
very little woe in his portion. Almost all the real 
evils of life come to us from a want of self-domina- 



PLEASURES OE MEMORY. 1S5 

tion. As a general rule, it may be said that the 
more a man has to do, the more he is master of 
himself. The best heritage, therefore, that a man 
can have is Work, He who laments that hard 
fate has compelled him to work is little better than 
a fool. 

I began this trick of essay-writing very early in 
life ; and whilst I have been correcting this paper 
for the press, accident has brought before me a 
passage in an essay, which I wrote before I was 
twenty years old. The paper, which -was one of 
many, was published in an Indian periodical at the 
time. I refer to it now because it discourses — visum 
teneatis ! — on one of the advantages of growing 
old, — indirectly, or rather inversely, for the subject 
is Memory : and I humbly think that now I 
should not wish to alter it. " One of the most 
manifest advantages of Memory over Hope " — this 
I wrote in 1834 — " is, that as we grow older, the 
former increases, while the latter diminishes. Every 
day gives us less to desire, more to remember. 
Memory moves with the past ; Hope with the 
future. I put little faith in anything that grows 
smaller every hour of the day. . . . Memory 
is like a magnifying glass ; the further we remove 



1 86 ON GROWING OLD. 

it from the object we are inspecting, the larger that 
object will appear. Every day, whilst it gives us 
fresh food for remembrance, renders our recollec- 
tions more beautiful and bright. . . . Thus we 
go on daily increasing in happiness, until old age 
steals upon us with gradual advances, and we have 
gained the summit of the mountain of life. . . ." 
There is more in the same strain ; but I have 
quoted enough. Such utterances as these are 
among the audacities of youth, of which I have 
before spoken. But they are not the less true. 
I was told by a local critic — one of the kindest 
and best of men — from whose criticism I have 
taken the words quoted, that I was wrong. 
" Chateaubriand observes," he said, " l that the 
pleasures of youth reproduced by memory are 
ruins viewed by torchlight.' We think Chateau- 
briand is right, and we are in a better position to 
form a judgment on that point than Mr. Kaye can 
be for twenty years to come." And now I have 
the advantage, in respect of years, over my friendly 
critic, who has long since passed away to his rest ; 
and I still abide by the belief that the blessings of 
memory are greater than the blessings of hope. 
" We know in part, and we prophesy in part." It 



PLEA S (J RES OF MEM OR V. 187 

was well-nigh all prophecy when I wrote, and now 
it is well-nigh all knowledge. And I cling to the 
old faith, and for the old reason ; that memory 
increases whilst hope diminishes — on this side of 
the grave. What have we old fellows to look 
for but the eternal rest ? It is much — very 
much — everything. But I wrote as a worldling, 
and I write now as a worldling, and I am not 
fit to discuss graver questions. Men think in 
their younger days that it would be a fine thing to 
be a husband ; a fine thing to be a father ; a fine 
thing to be a grandfather ; a fine thing to write 
a book, to be praised in the newspapers, to be 
quoted in Parliament ; to become a member of 
the House, perhaps a member of the Government ; 
and when all this is done, what is earthly hope 
to them ? But the delights of memory are inex- 
haustible. Our first friendship, our first love (per- 
haps our last), our first success — we can live them 
all over again when we please, and the older we are, 
the mor.e vivid is the remembrance. " Juvat, oh ! 
meminisse beati temporis /" These reminiscences 
may be " ruins seen by torchlight." But ruins, 
seen by torchlight or by moonlight, are beautifully 
picturesque. I have seen Melrose and Furness 



1 33 ON GROWING OLD. 

by these lights ; and day took away half their 
beauties. 

Again, it is to be observed that as we grow old, 
we arrive at a just conception of the great truth 
that the pains and pleasures of life are pretty 
equally distributed over the world. We come to 
learn that if in some one respect Providence has 
been more chary of her favours to us than to our 
friends, that in others we have had our full share, 
or more than our full share — good measure, perhaps, 
pressed down and running over. If money has 
been scanty, we have enjoyed a large measure of 
health. If we have been disappointed in our 
pursuit of fame, we have been compensated by 
a rich portion of love. We are sure to find our 
compensation somewhere. And looking at the lives 
of our neighbours shall we not perceive that if they 
have escaped some peculiar sufferings which we 
have been compelled to bear, they have some 
sorrows of their own from which we ourselves are 
exempt ? My brother has a better house than I 
have ; he has more servants to minister to him ; he 
has more money in the funds ; — but my children 
are healthier than his : thanks be to God, the doctor 
seldom darkens my doors. Why, then, should I 



CO MP ENS A TIO NS. 1 89 

complain ? We all suffer — high and low, man and 
brute. I take up, as I write, a little red book about 
Garibaldi at Caprcra — not in any hope of finding a 
thought or an illustration to aid me, but in the 
indulgence of a desultory habit of which I have 
spoken above — and I come upon a passage about 
the great liberator and his cows. The ' cows,' we 
are told by Colonel Yecchi, were sick, nigh unto 
death, from eating a poisonous herb called the 
ferola, and Garibaldi administered to them lumps 
of sugar and sage precepts at the same time. 
" Poor things," he said, " you also have your 
sufferings : dreadful bodily pains instead of heart- 
aches ! Have not I also my ferola in the bad 
treatment of my comrades in arms, and in the 
sufferings of the people in Rome and Venetia ? " * 
No doubt. We all have our own particular ferola. 
We all have some subtle poison or other working 
into our blood. But I am not sure that, if I had 
been Garibaldi's Boswell, I should have told this 
story. Real wisdom consists not in seeking occa- 



* I observe, whilst I am correcting this sheet for the press, that 
a recent essayist, writing on "Cynicism," has placed Garibaldi 
among the " non-cynics." Perhaps the writer may think differently 
should he ever read the passage in the text. (1870.) 



T9o ON GROWING OLD. 

sions to convince ourselves, or to convince others, 
that we have suffered like our neighbours of the 
human or of the brute family ; but in consoling 
ourselves with the reflection that we have enjoy- 
ments like unto theirs. If Garibaldi had one day 
seen his cows ruminating in the sun, and had apo- 
strophized them, saying, " Happy creatures ! you 
have your delights ! And have not I too basked 
in the sun ? Has it not been mine to chew the 
cud of sweet fancies ? Have I not ruminated — 
humbly, but thankfully — over the applause of a 
free people ; the love of noble natures ; the liberty 
God has suffered me, weak instrument as I am, to 
achieve for a great and a grateful nation ? " Would 
it not be pleasanter, I say, to look at this side of 
the stuff, than at the frayed ends suggesting that 
poisonous/m?/# ? Let us all think of the beatitudes 
that are continually hovering above us. Let us so 
believe in them — 

" That neither evil tongues, 
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men ; 
Nor greetings where no kindness is ; nor all 
The dreary intercourse of daily life, 
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb 
Our settled faith, that all which we behold 
Is full of blessings." 

The poet, as all men know, writes of the great 



INTEREST OF DAILY LIFE. 191 

solace of external nature. I too have pondered 
these same things, and on the same spot. But it 
is not permitted to working men, save in blessed 
autumnal holidays, to throw up praises and thanks- 
givings skywards from the dear banks of the 
" sylvan Wye." Still, may not we carry the same 
philosophy into our offices and counting-houses, or 
something even still better ? For I hold that even 
in this Wordsworthian passage there is something 
of paradox and contradiction, arising from the 
incompleteness of the poet's faith in the doctrine 
which he professes. Why, in a world so full of 
blessings, is the intercourse of daily life to be 
accounted dreary ? In the commonest things and 
in the most commonplace people, there is some- 
thing to interest, if we do not wilfully close our 
eyes against it. It is our own fault if w r e do not 
see it. It is our own egotism that blinds us. If 
we could be successfully couched for that moral 
cataract, we should see plainly that it is not a 
dreary desert, but a cheerful garden, that stretches 
out before us, even in the most beaten paths of 
unexciting town life. Those " thoroughly unin- 
teresting," "slow fellows," whom we meet every 
day, and whom Adolescens so despises, have all 



192 ON GROWING OLD. 

their own little romances ; their hearts throb as 
quickly as our own ; there is tenderness of feeling, 
chivalry of sentiment, beneath the outer crust ; 
and perhaps the most where you least look to 
find it. 

And through this fuller recognition of the deep 
human interest that underlies the great expanse of 
Commonplace, increase of years brings us increase 
of happiness. We enlarge our sympathies as we 
grow old. The scales of egotism fall from our 
eyes, and we see an inner life of beauty and 
benignity beneath what is outwardly unattractive 
and unpromising. I know nothing in the blunder- 
ing, puppy-blind, self-importance of youth, for 
which I would give this deeper insight into life — 
this enlarged love of humanity. Of course, there 
is another love greater still, of which this human 
love is but a part ; and it must not be thought 
that I ignore it if I do not speak of it here. If it 
does not grow broader, and strike deeper, as we 
advance in life, we grow old to very little purpose. 
But it is not for me, as I have said, to write of 
these things : and my space is exhausted. I have 
but thrown up a few chance thoughts — looking at 
the subject in its worldly aspects ; and even in 



COMFORTING THOUGHTS. 



193 



that light there is far more to say of it than I 
have attempted to say in this humble essay. What 
I have said, I have at least said gratefully and 
reverently ; and I hope that it may bring comfort 
and contentment to the minds of others, who, like 
myself, have just awakened to the thought that 
they are Growing Old. 

[April, 1862.] 




13 



ON TOLERATION. 



ON TOLERATION. 




OME years ago, under the same good 
auspices, I wrote an essay On Growing 
Old. Since that time I have grown old ; 
and I have been thinking what I have gained 
by it. Perhaps the sum-total is much ; perhaps 
little. I am not now going to inquire. I would 
merely discourse upon one of my gains. I trust 
that I may use the first person plural and say 
that it is great gain that as We grow older 
We grow more tolerant. We are less frequently 
disappointed — we are less querulous and cen- 
sorious — because we have dropped some of the 
egotism of our youth, and have ceased to look 
for the same manifestations from others as 
we know to be habitual in ourselves. And it is 
not only that with advancing age we come to 
understand more clearly that the same inward 
qualities or feelings speak out from different 
persons after different outward fashions, just as 



INTOLERANCE OF YOUTH. 195 

different men go by different roads to the same 
bourne, or do the same business in different ways ; 
but that we learn how to take account of the 
influence of circumstances in moulding character 
and shaping conduct, and are more gentle and 
moderate in our judgments. I can remember that, 
w T hen I was young, I sat in a sort of " bloody 
assize," not only upon the doings, but on the 
characters of my neighbours ; and I pursued with 
a remorseless egotism all who happened to differ 
from me in action, in opinion, or in sentiment. I 
may be worse in many other respects ; but in this 
I trust that I am better ; and I would fain hope 
that many old or elderly people have profited in 
like manner by the attrition of years. 

I am afraid, nevertheless, that there is still a 
large amount of intolerance in the world, even 
among those who have lived long enough to be 
kinder and wiser. For eighteen centuries, ever 
since the Great Exemplar of the Christian world 
stooped down and wrote with his hand on the 
dust, mankind has been open to the same rebuke ; 
and we have been inclined to cast the first stone, 
if we only dare to do it with a knowledge of our 
own innocence. I purpose, therefore, to write some- 



196 ON TOLERATION, 

thing on the subject of Toleration, though with a 
full knowledge that I shall leave unsaid much that 
ought to be said about it. It is not, however, 
my design to discourse upon political or religious 
intolerance ; although, having lived much in the 
great principality of Wales, Heaven know^s that of 
both I have seen more than enough. Frightful 
things in the way of dispossessions and evictions — 
cruel pressure of orthodox landlords on dissenting 
tenants not disposed to vote for church-rates, have 
often been done, bringing honest men and families 
to the dust of ruin.* Of course, this intolerance 
of the rich begets counter-irritations of intolerance 
among the poor. You may hear it said, " They 

have passed a church-rate, and Mrs. " (naming 

the rector's wife) " has got a new bonnet." Of course 
the notion that the parsoness's new head-gear was 



* I ought to state that I wrote this passage some months ago — 
long before Mr. Richard brought the intolerance of Welsh landlords 
to the notice of the House of Commons. I see it stated in a con- 
servative journal, that Welsh evictions are pure myths. I feel 
tolerably certain that if the writer had ever lived in Wales, he would 
not have written anything so notoriously at variance with the truth. 
I wish that I could believe the story to be a fiction. My own experi- 
ence teaches me that the landlord screw has been put on very tightly, 
not merely with reference to votes at elections, but in respect also 
to votes at vestry meetings. 



SPECIAL TEMPTATIONS. 197 

bought out of the parochial money was simply pre- 
posterous. But the belief was widely accepted among 
the Poor. It was simply the intolerance of extreme 
ignorance, which cannot understand that anything 
can be done by others without aview to personal gain. 
It is this ignorance, indeed — partly want of 
knowledge, and partly want of imagination — by 
no means confined to the Poor, which is the source 
of nearly all the intolerance with which the world 
is afflicted. We know the full extent of the temp- 
tations and inducements by which we are beset, 
and we judge others with reference to the circum- 
stances which surround ourselves. But it is no 
merit in a blind man that he is free from " lust of 
the eye," or in a dumb man that he is not given to 
" evil speaking." Men and women, in all condi- 
tions of life, have their special temptations and 
their special exemptions from temptation ; and 
there is a moral law, at least, by which we may 
sometimes move for an arrest of judgment, when 
we learn that some poor sinner has been tempted 
beyond what he could bear. Rich and Poor, old 
and young, men and women, are subject, equally 
or unequally, to various internal and external 
influences, all more or less adverse to purity of life 



198 ON TOLERATION. 

and integrity of conduct ; and it would be far 
better for us all, in the long run, if we would pray 
for power to resist our own inducements to evil, 
instead of thanking God that we do not yield 
to the beguilements that allure our neighbours. 
Every one knows this ; it is the merest common- 
place. But nothing so generally admitted in 
words is in practice so uniformly denied. It may 
be strange, but it is most true, that near the end, 
as we are, of the nineteenth century of the Christian 
era, no teaching is more wanted than this ; ay, it 
would seem that even the teachers need to be 
taught, else why have I read, whilst I have been 
writing this paper at odd times, of an English 
clergyman bringing his dairywoman to the judg- 
ment-seat for taking a pennyworth of milk from 
the can without the permission of her reverend 
master, and of a bench of justices who sent her to 
prison for a week upon such a charge ? 

Above all things, I think, that we should be 
more tolerant towards the Poor. We should en- 
deavour to understand thoroughly what are the 
temptations which beset them, before we condemn 
them for doing what is not done by people who 
live easy lives, and, comparatively at least, " fare 



RICH AND POOR. 199 

sumptuously every day." The morning dram and 
the evening visit to the alehouse are, doubtless, 
abominable things ; but if Dives had to turn out in 
all weathers at five o'clock in the morning, perhaps 
earlier, would he abstain from fortifying himself by 
a matutinal stimulant of some kind or other ? And 
if he had to go home in the evening to a close 
and untidy room, a slatternly wife and fractious 
children, would he not fain take refuge in some 
comfortable place of social resort, whether a club- 
house or a tap-room ? Indeed, without these pro- 
vocations, does he not often comport himself in 
this manner ? The morning stimulant may be of 
a more aristocratic character than a noggin of gin 
— it may, perhaps, be sanctimoniously disguised as 
a " tonic " — but in effect it is the same thing. And 
the smoking-room of a West-End club is only a 
better kind of tap-room. I daresay that poor 
Opifex would as soon have a tumbler of soda-and- 
brandy, or a spoonful of bitter tonic in a glass of 
sherry, as the cheaper fluid to which he is com- 
pelled in the morning ; and that he would not 
object to solace himself at sun-down with choice 
regalia in the smoking-room of the Regimentum. 
For my own part, I wonder less at the amount of 



200 ON TOLERATION. 

self-indulgence of this kind, than at the extent of 
the forbearance that is exercised. I observed a 
man, one evening, who had been at work since six 
in the morning, at the building of some suburban 
villas over against my cottage, shoulder his basket 
of tools, and prepare to march homewards. Just 
as he started, a workman from another job, also 
homeward-bound, met him and said, " How far for 
you, Bill ? " Five mile " was the answer, — and it 
was said cheerily enough, — as he strode on towards 
another county. I could not help thinking that I 
hoped he would have a pint of beer at some half- 
way house. For my own part, I am afraid that if 
I had to work some twelve hours at house-building, 
with a supplement of a five-mile walk, morning 
and evening, on a hot summer's day, I should 
require a good number of refreshers of this kind 
between my uprising and my downsitting. No 
one can forget the heat of last summer, * or how 
rich people lived in a continual state of iced claret- 
cup. There was a horrible report in the autumn 
that nearly all the workmen, of whom my friend 
with the five-mile walk was one, engaged on the 
buildings opposite to me, had gone away largely 

* The summer of 1868. 



BAD LANGUAGE. 201 

in debt to the proprietor of a contiguous tavern. 
Very strong opinions were of course expressed on 
the "rascality" of the proceeding; and I grieved 
over it, because the tavern-keeper was a poor man ; 
but I felt that, if I had been a rich one, I would 
fain have wiped out the score, in consideration of 
those fiery days and the hours of hard toil at sub- 
stantial house-building, at a time when it was a 
laborious process even to lie upon a sofa and build 
castles in the air. 

But there are worse things than beer-drinking 
— worse things than not paying for it — with which 
the Poor are often charged in no tolerant spirit by 
their more fortunate brethren. There is foul lan- 
guage, blasphemous, obscene, sickening the very 
soul of the more refined passer-by — terrible often 
in its unmeant significance. The extreme inap- 
propriateness of the expletives in common use 
among the " lower orders " proves that those who 
use the offensive words attach no particular idea 
to them — perhaps do not even know that they are 
offensive words that could shock the most sensitive 
hearer. And, after all, so far as perfect incongruity 
is concerned, the "awfully jolly," or "awfully nice" 
of the young gentlemen and gentlewomen of the 



202 ON TOLERATION. 

period, cannot possibly be outmatched in inappro- 
priateness — even by the application of the epithet 
which protestants apply to Queen Mary, to such 
things as a good tap of beer or a good screw of 
tobacco. Those who use this and other expletives 
so freely as to send a shudder through us as they 
pass on the high road, have been habituated to the 
words since they were children— words that issued 
freely from the paternal lips — and they are no 
more than "very " is to us greybeards or "awfully " 
to our children. It must be in the memory of 
many, that less than half-a-century ago, the boys 
at the most aristocratic public schools swore even 
more terribly than " our troops in Flanders," and 
that the most obscene language flowed freely from 
the rosy lips of little fellows of twelve or thirteen. 
There is nothing so readily transfusible as con- 
tagion of this kind. If we could learn French and 
Italian, German and Romaic, as easily, we should 
all be great linguists in our boyhood. And perhaps 
it might be well, therefore, with our shudders to com- 
bine a thrill of thankfulness that neither the examples 
of our youth nor the tendencies of the age have been 
or are such as to make the dreadful words that so 
revolt us as familiar to our lips as to our ears. 



OUTRAGES ON WOMEN. 203 

Again, we hear a great deal about outrages on 
women among the Poor. I remember writing, a 
dozen years ago or more, an article on this subject 
in a quarterly review. But I am afraid that I did 
not make the required allowances for the aggrava- 
tions which bristle up so continuously in the poor 
man's domestic life. It may be assumed that men 
in good houses, with establishments of servants, do 
not beat their wives — with fists, or sticks, or pokers, 
or the legs of broken chairs. In a more refined 
state of society the cruelties to which women are 
subjected, in the married state, are not commonly 
physical cruelties. But, perhaps, they are quite as 
unendurable. And it is not improbable that those 
who now go home every day, when they like it, to 
a spacious well-furnished residence, with a servant 
to open the door to them, and to bring them a 
glass of iced sherry, to be quietly sipped whilst 
they are reading the evening papers in their library, 
and who thus cool and console themselves, if need 
be, before entering the family circle, and who are 
sure to see at dinner a well-ordered table and a 
well-dressed wife, and to be regaled with viands 
more or less choice, might not be in a much better 
frame of mind or hand than the ill-educated work- 



204 ON TOLERATION. 

ing-man, if they were to go home weary, worn, 
foot-sore, irritated, to a w r retched house, with all 
the aggravations, perhaps, of an untidy wife, a bare 
table, and a bevy of noisy children. If under these 
evil influences, 

' ' Ruder words will soon rush in, 
To spread the breach that words begin," 

and words, after a little space develop into blows, 
we cannot be so greatly surprised. We may be 
sorry, but we ought not to be shocked. At all 
events, we ought not to pass in our hearts severe 
censures on the " brutal offenders." There is other 
brutality than that of the fist and the bludgeon, — 
quite as cruel, perhaps, and less excusable. But it 
does not bring the culprit before a police magis- 
trate, and, perhaps, is beyond the reach of the 
Divorce Court. The difference is only in the out- 
ward and visible sign ; and the blow which pro- 
duces a black-eye, which disappears in a fortnight, 
may be infinitely less painful than the stab which 
inflicts a heart-wound never to be healed till God 
wipes away all tears from our eyes. 

It is commonly said that all these evils — 
violence of word and violence of act, are the results 
of hard drinking. And there is no single word into 



DRINKING. 205 

which so much bitterness of reprobation is infused 
as that which closes the last sentence. " That 
detestable habit of much-drinking ! " And yet I 
know nothing towards which we ought to be more 
tolerant. No one, indeed, rich or poor, is more to 
be pitied than he who feels a craving for such help 
as this, and yet, from some constitutional pecu- 
liarity, cannot find the solace which he seeks 
without lowering himself as a reasonable being 
in the estimation of his fellows. It is a fact, in 
the knowledge of us all, that a certain quantity of 
" strong drink," which w 7 ill freshen and strengthen 
one man, and render him more fit to perform his 
appointed work, will wholly unhinge and incapaci- 
tate another. There may be seen sometimes a 
man of noble nature and glorious intellectual facul- 
ties, whom much trouble has driven thus to solace 
himself, and who has utterly degraded himself to 
the level of the beasts that perish — and that, too, 
by not drinking more than would have given other 
men strength to bear their crosses and to do their 
work with higher courage and clearer brains. One 
of the finest scholars whom I have known in a life- 
time of more than half-a-century, — a man alto- 
gether of a refined mind and a most kindly heart, 



206 ON TOLERATION. 

— utterly crushed by the long illness and subse- 
quent death of a dearly-loved wife, lived for years 
in a chronic state of intoxication ; and yet, my 
impression is, that he did not drink in the course 
of the day as much as many, perhaps most, men 
could have drunk without the least perceptible 
change. But he could not "carry his liquor dis- 
creetly ; " and so he passed for a sot. Poor J. B. 
I never compassionated any one so much. Of 
course he was condemned, and perhaps deservedly 
— for in respect of drink, whether you take a thim- 
bleful or a bucketful, it is all the same : the right 
measure is just that which you know will do you 
good. If you feel that you are "putting an enemy 
into your mouth to steal away your brains," you 
know that even the one glass, which gives to 
another only strength and cheerfulness and in- 
creased intelligence, and is as a tonic medicine to 
him, body and mind, is to you the vilest of poisons. 
But, even looking at it from the worst point of view, 
there should be infinite toleration in such cases for 
those who are driven by much anguish, whether 
of mind or of body, to stimulants or narcotics ; and 
truly it behoves us to think sometimes — 

"That what to us seems vice may be but woe." 



USE GF NARCOTICS. 207 

There are few who have not read that touching 
passage in one of Coleridge's letters, in which he 
narrates briefly, but with a graphic force almost 
terrible in its earnestness, the evil influences which 
drove him to have recourse to opium. But I may 
still call it to remembrance. " My conscience," he 
wrote to a friend, " indeed bears me witness that, 
from the time I quitted Cambridge, no human 
being was more indifferent to the pleasures of the 
table than myself, or less needed any stimulation 
to my spirits ; and that by a most unhappy 
quackery, after having been almost bedrid for six 
months with swollen knees and other distressing 
symptoms of disordered digestive functions, and 
through that most pernicious form of ignorance, 
medical half-knowledge, I was seduced into the 
use of narcotics, not secretly, but (such was my 
ignorance) openly and exultingly, as one w T ho had 
discovered, and was never weary of recommending, 
a grand panacea, and saw not the truth till my 
body had contracted a habit and a necessity ; and 
that, even to the latest, my responsibility is for 
cowardice and defect of fortitude, not for the least 
craving after gratification or pleasurable sensation 
of any sort, but for yielding to pain, terror, and 



20S ON T0LERA1I0X. 

haunting bewilderment. But this I say to man 
only, who knows only what has been yielded, not 
what has been resisted. Before God I have but 
one voice, * Mercy ! mercy ! woe is me.' ' ; And in 
these words we see what is very often the whole 
inner history of the degrading practices which we 
are so prone to condemn with all the vituperative 
rhetoric at our command. There are very few, I 
believe, who drink immoderately for the sake of 
drinking. I mean by this that they derive no 
sensual pleasure from such potations, — that there 
is no activity of delight in this self-abandonment ; 
but that the object sought is an escape from posi- 
tive pain. An active misery of some sort, physical 
or mental, is to be stupified — deadened : and if 
the same result could be produced by periodical 
doses of assafcetida, valerian, or any other nauseous 
medicine, with less injury to mind and body, many, 
perhaps most, would resort to it instead of to alco- 
holic drinks. It is commonly some inscrutable 
physical derangement which lays the foundation 
of an evil habit of this kind, and we should not, 
therefore, condemn too remorselessly that which 
we are simply unable to understand, because we 
have not in like manner been tempted. To what 



STEALING. 20 9 

extent the physical, for which we cannot be respon- 
sible, underlies, in this and other human frailties, 
the moral, for which we are responsible, can never 
be known ; nor shall we know, upon this side of 
eternity, how far it may be taken into account in 
the final reckoning. 

And then of that other matter, whereof I have 
spoken with reference to the temptations of the 
Poor — what is commonly called stealing — the 
infraction of the eighth commandment. The steal- 
ing of a loaf of bread from a baker's counter or a 
turnip from a farmer's field, or the knocking down 
of a stray rabbit in the squire's warren, though each 
offence be the result of the cravings of hunger, is vile 
and unpardonable to the last degree, and society 
would, of course, be disorganized altogether, if the 
necessities of nature were thus to be recognized. 
But is there no other kind of thieving — no other 
kind of poaching ? What answer would the lav,* 
esteem it to be if a poor man charged with stealing 
a sheep, one of a flock of two hundred, the property 
of a neighbouring squire, were to answer, " Please 
your worship, he stole my only daughter." The 
criminal law can take no cognizance of the latter 
offence, but the stolen sheep may send a man to 

14 



210 ON TOLERATION. 

penal servitude for a number of years, and not 
very long ago would have sent him to the gallows. 
I make no complaint against the law, — I am only 
pleading for toleration. And I would suggest that 
there may be some amongst us who could not hear 
unmoved those solemn words, u Thou art the man? 
But much as we are wont to err in this respect, 
it must in all truth be added that we do not keep 
all our intolerance for those beneath us. We 
often go grievously wrong in our judgment of the 
offences of those whom high station surrounds with 
its own peculiar chain of temptations. A friend 
once said to me, " I believe that I should have 
been one of the worst men that ever lived if I had 
been an idle one." I have felt the same myself at 
times, and many may echo the misgiving. From 
how many follies, how many wickednesses, are we 
preserved merely by want of money and want of 
time. If we have not ruined ourselves by horse- 
racing or degraded ourselves by immoralities of a 
kind not so publicly canvassed, we may be thankful 
that we have not had the opportunities which are 
present to those who have time to be killed and 
money to be spent ; but we have clearly no right 
to rejoice vaingloriously in our immunity from such 



TEMPTATIONS OF THE RICH. 211 

evils. A man who is occupied from morning to 
night with honest labour cannot do very much 
harm in the course of the day. But let him be 
exempted from the necessity of work, and place 
thousands to his account at Coutts's, and see whether 
he will be a more self-denying honest gentleman 
than any of our young dukes and marquises who 
have gone headlong to ruin. Perhaps these young 
dukes and marquises are not less to be compas- 
sionated than the toil-worn day-labourers whose 
besetting temptations and infirmities lie in such 
opposite directions and are of such a different kind. 
I do not know anything worse for a young man 
than to come into a great estate on first attaining 
that great heritage of woe, the lordship of himself. 
He thinks the w r ealth, of which he suddenly be- 
comes the possessor, so boundless ; and there are 
so many tempters lying in wait with honeyed 
words to lure to his destruction the voyager in that 
frail bark where sit " Youth at the prow and plea- 
sure at the helm," and all the gay company lounge, 
laughing and singing, whilst the boat is sinking in 
smooth water. 

" Oh, different temptations lurk for all ! 
The rich have idleness and luxury. 
The poor are tempted onward to their fall 
By the oppression of their poverty ; 



212 ON TOLERATION. 

Hard is the struggle — deep the agony, 

When from the demon watch that lies in wait, 

The soul with shuddering terror strives to flee, 

And idleness, or want, or love, or hate — 

Lure us to various crimes for one condemning fate." 

And, therefore, I say, recognizing this truth, it 
becomes us to be tender and forbearing in our 
judgments, when the sirens are too powerful for the 
young lords of the Castle of Indolence, as they put 
out to sea in their gilded barks. And all the more 
should we rejoice and admire when, as sometimes 
happens, all temptations are wrestled down, and 
the will to do good is equal to the power. Truly 
says the accomplished writer of the above lines, 
after dwelling on " the victory in a battle mutely 
fought," achieved by others,* — 

" Yet doubly beautiful it is to see * 
One set in the temptation of High Class, 
Keep the inherent deep nobility 
Of a great nature, strong to over-pass 
The check of circumstance, and choking mass 
Of vicious faults, which youthful leisure woo — 
Mirror each thought in honour's stainless glass, 
And by all kindly deeds that power can do, 
Prove that the brave good heart hath come of lineage true." 

* There are many of my readers whom I need not remind that 
these lines are taken from Caroline Norton's Child of the Islands^ 
which, from first to last, is a beautiful poetical plea for toleration — 
very tender, compassionate, and charitable in all its utterances. The 
value of such a book must long outlive the occasion which called it 
forth. I have but one, which I more treasure, in my library. 



TRUE NOBILITY. 213 

A quarter of a century has passed since this 
was written, and England has rejoiced, during that 
time, in noble exemplars of that true nobility, to 
the splendour of which native worth has contri- 
buted more than rank and wealth, and all the 
outer crust of the blue blood. And, second to 
none amongst these, is one whom the gifted writer 
has seen grow up amongst the nearest and dearest 
of her kindred — that sister's son, whom to know is 
to admire and love. We are all now grieving, as I 
write, over some sad decadences of noble houses, 
and many shallow-brained, sensational writers are 
drawing inferences from them not favourable to 
our Aristocracy ; but these instances are, after all, 
only the exceptions, indeed the rare exceptions, 
and I could cite against every single example of 
lost opportunities many of such opportunities 
turned to the best account. And I am glad to 
see that the highest amongst us are appreciating 
the true dignity of honest labour. When we are 
told that the head of a great ducal house (and he 
is not alone in this) is apprenticing his younger 
sons to commerce, and wishing them to become in 
time merchant princes, we may well have greater 
faith than ever in the nobility of the land. 



214 ON TOLERATION. 

Then again, perhaps, we are not always very- 
tolerant to the Young. Much has been written 
lately, and with great severity, against the rising 
generation, as though the young men of the 
present day were infinitely worse than their fathers. 
And, in some respects, perhaps they are. But 
ought not we greybeards to consider that, after all, 
it may be our own fault ? It may not be an axiom 
of universal truth that " good fathers make good 
sons." Indeed, I have known many cases in which 
industry, self-denial, and other kindred virtues 
have shown a tendency to " skip a generation," 
like the gout. But there is enough in the saying 
for us to ponder over very gravely when we are 
disappointed and grieved by the conduct of our 
children. I do not think that, in the recent dis- 
cussions upon this subject, sufficient stress was laid 
upon the fact that the age is emphatically one of 
excessive competition, and that men devote more 
time than they did of old to affairs of business, 
and less to the performance of their domestic 
duties. It is a hard, grinding, money-making age. 
Men toil early and late for their wives and children, 
and think that they have done well. The man 
who said that he had never seen his children by 



PARENTS AND CHILDREN. 215 

daylight except on Sundays, expressed, with only 
a very little exaggeration, what is a common state 
of things. And I say that such fathers do well in 
their generation as " bread-finders ; " but might 
they not do better, if they lived less in the count- 
ing-house and a little more in the nursery and the 
school-room ? One cannot but respect the man 
who " scorns delights and lives laborious days," for 
the sake of those who " are to come after him ; " 
but there is better wealth than money to be stored 
up for his children. We may speak tenderly of 
the error, but it is none the less an error, for our 
tenderness. Of small benefit is it to make money 
for our children, if we do not teach them how to 
spend it wisely. I have, whilst writing this, 
opened a book, in my desultory way, — a volume 
of Mazzini's Essays, — in which I find it written : 
" Compelled by your position to constant toil, you 
are less able to bestow upon your children a fitting 
education. Nevertheless, even you can in part 
fulfil your arduous mission, both by word and by 
example. You can do it by example. 'Your 
children will resemble you, and become corrupt or 
virtuous in proportion as you are yourself corrupt 
or virtuous. How shall they become honest, chari- 



216 ON TOLERATION. 

table, and humane, if you are without charity for 
your brothers ? How shall they restrain their 
grosser appetite if they see you given up to intem- 
perance ? How shall they preserve their native 
innocence if you shrink not from offending their 
modesty by indecent act or obscene word ? You 
are the living model by which their pliant nature 
is fashioned. It depends on you whether your 
children be men or brutes.' (Lamennais : Words 
of a Believer) And you may educate your children 
by your words. . . . Let them learn from your 
lips, and the calm approval of their mother, how 
lovely is the path of virtue ; how noble it is to 
become apostles of the truth ; how holy to sacrifice 
themselves if need be for their fellows. " 

It is well that we elders should ponder these 
words of a great teacher — or, rather, of two great 
teachers — when we press heavily upon the short- 
comings of the young. Let us ask ourselves, 
Have we done all that we could do — 

"To teach high thoughts and amiable words, 
And courtliness and the desire of fame, 
And love of truth and all that makes a man," 

before we complain, as it is much the fashion now 
to complain, that the present generation of young 



YOUNG MEN OF THE PERIOD. 217 

men are more selfish and corrupt than the past. 
Self-questionings of this kind are of the very 
essence of toleration. But there are other questions 
than those which so often result in self-reproach — 
other excuses for the young than the errors of the 
old. Chiefly there are what are called "the ten- 
dencies of the age." If our sons, in the adolescent 
state, are not as domestic as we ourselves were at 
that dangerous period of life, is it not true that we 
had fewer temptations — that there were fewer snares 
to entrap us — that it was not then, as it is now, the 
business in life of large numbers of people to pro- 
vide, on a great scale but at a small charge, intoxi- 
cating and demoralizing amusements, after dark, 
for the residents in large towns ? It would be 
simply asinine for a man of fifty to say to his son, 
" I did not go to music-halls when I was of your 
age." The son would answer silently, if not vocife- 
rously, — for the sons of the period are not very 
forbearing and respectful in their addresses to 
parents, — " But you would, if there had been any." 
It may be so. I cannot say that I am at all clear 
on the subject. I should be sorry to put in a very 
distinct negative. I think that we had our " larks" 
in those days ; but they were few and far between, 



21 8 ON TOLERATION. 

and we went home very regularly to the paternal 
dinner. The respected gentleman, w T ho would in 
these days be called my " governor " (there was 
a generation between us), though he had a thriving 
business in the City, by which he made more than 
a quarter of a million out of half-a-crown, was at 
home to dinner on Wandsworth Common every 
day at half-past five ; and I well remember the 
agony of mind that I suffered if by any unhappy 
chance I seemed to be at such a distance from 
home as to be likely not to be full dressed, in 
complete suit of black, white neckcloth, black silk 
stockings and pumps, to appear in the drawing- 
room in response to the u second bell." I am 
afraid that the young men of the period are very 
irregular in this respect — that their place at the 
dinner-table is often vacant without any explana- 
tion, or that they dribble into it with the second 
course. We never ventured to appear late in those 
days ; and were fain, in case of default, to make 
interest with the butler to get something cold in 
the odd room, which was called " the study." But 
then the " governor " of those days was more 
regular than he is in these. Clubs were only in 
their infancy. Those family compacts, which are 



MUSIC-HALLS AND TOBACCO. 219 

anything but infrequent now-a-days, for a paternal 
dinner at the club, that wife and daughters may 
have more time to dress for opera or ball, were 
unknown when I was a boy, for dinners were early. 
Men drop in at their clubs on their way homewards, 
and appear about eight o'clock. Of course this 
kind of irregularity affects the younger members of 
the family. The absence of the parental red tape 
begets looseness of conduct ; and the ubiquitous 
attractions of the music-halls in such circumstances 
are not to be resisted. I wonder what is the amount 
of capital sunk in these institutions, and what the 
statistics of the female population engaged to 
appear nightly in the scantiest possible attire ? It 
is true that we had the " Cider Cellars " and the 
" Coal Hole " in my young days, but the coarse- 
ness there was all masculine, and our attendances 
were rare. I do not remember that they had much 
effect upon the lives of our generation. Perhaps 
they rather disgusted us. 

That continual pest of much smoking had not 
grown up in those days. It was feebly struggling 
into English existence, and was not recognized as 
a legitimate custom. Such was the repugnance of 
most elderly people to the habit, when I was a 



22o ON TOLERATION. 

stripling, that when I occasionally indulged, on the 
top of a coach or during a pull up the river, in a 
cigar (to smoke a pipe was in those days an unfail- 
ing mark of the canaille), I never dared to present 
myself in the family circle without an entire change 
of clothes, and at least an hour of ablution and 
deodorisation by means of lavender-water or eau- 
de-Cologne. And yet such was the keenness of 
the olfactory nerves of the period, that I was 
generally detected after all. Smoking has now 
become a habit amongst us ; and it would be 
intolerant on our part to condemn our sons because 
they bring their pipes out of their pockets after 
breakfast, and, after an unknown number of appli- 
cations to the weed during the day-time, finish up 
with a smoke before going to bed. Of course they 
do not hesitate to appear before their parents 
reeking with tobacco, or to light their pipes (to 
put the case mildly) in the hall. But the age, 
not the boys — dear fellows ! — are to be blamed 
for this. We should have done the same when 
we were youngsters, if the customs of the period 
had been in our favour. 

Again, I think that we men are not very 
tolerant of what we call the weaknesses of women ; 



WOMANLY WEAKNESSES. 221 

but in which, after all, lies much of their strength. 
The commonest complaint of all is, that they are 
"fond of dress." For my own part I would not 
give much for a woman who is not fond of dress. 
Nor would I care much to know a man indisposed 
to encourage this feminine fondness.* The true 
knightly instinct is to feel towards the chosen one 
an unfailing desire — 

"To compass her with sweet observances, 
To dress her beautifully, and keep her true." 

I can hardly conceive any greater delight for an 
honest, loving gentleman than to do these good 
works and to mark their results. And it is to be 
said that in many, if not in most instances, the 
desire to dress well is only a desire to please. As 
between husband and wife, carelessness in dress is 
one of the first indications of declining affection. 
And even if, as sometimes happens, the love of 
dress is, for the most part, a desire to outshine 
other women, it is a natural, indeed a harmless 
emulation. If women have no nobler ambitions, 
it is mainly the fault of the men. If they cannot 
speak each other down in debate, they may dress 

* See note at the end of this Essay. 



222 ON TOLERATION. 

each other down in society. It may be said that 
victory depends in such a case upon the husband's 
purse or the dressmaker's art, not upon the genius 
of the competitor. But this is true only in a 
limited sense. No amount of money to buy 
clothes, and no skill in the artiste who makes 
them, can compensate for a want of taste in the 
wearer. Taste in dress commonly indicates a 
general sense of the becoming in all domestic 
concerns. The Frenchman who wrote a treatise 
on The Duty of a Pretty Woman to Look Pretty, 
did not address himself to the discussion of a mere 
frivolity. There was an under-current of philo- 
sophy beneath it. And surely there is something 
like ingratitude to the Giver of all good gifts not 
to treasure and to cherish, even to rejoice in, the 
divinest of them all. 

I think, too, that we are somewhat prone to 
misunderstand and to misjudge women, because 
their ways are so different from the manifestations 
of our masculine natures. It is common, for 
example, to attribute want of affection to others, 
merely because it is not in their nature to be 
affectionate after our own external pattern. We 
break our hearts over the thought, " I should not 



MANYSIDEDNESS OF LOVE. 223 

have done this or that," and with the marvellously 
false logic of self-torture, we say, " If there were 
any true love, this thing could not be." But love 
is not one, but many. Its angel-wings are of varied 
plumage. I had a very dear friend who married, 
as men the wisest amongst us often do, a woman 
younger than and much unlike himself, — in all 
ways charming, but in all ways provoking, too, 
as only very pretty women can be, — saucily, 
coquettishly, petulantly provoking, often rainy 
and stormy, but with marvellous gleams of tender 
sunshine — beautiful and bewitching and irresistible 
always ; treading dow r n reason, judgment, all things 
with her small foot, and snapping all the boun- 
daries that lie between right and wrong with her 
queenly hand. Some men would have resented 
this — my friend saddened under it. Like Shak- 
speare's Moor, he was " not easily jealous," but, in 
time, he came to be " perplexed in the extreme." 
So he spoke to her one day, very gravely and 
sorrowfully, saying that he was afraid that she did 
not love him — that she would have been happier 
with some one else. And what did she do ? She 
turned upon him a face radiant with happiness, 
and said, " You dear old goose, not love you — 



224 ON TOLERATION. 

■ happier with some one else ! ' Why, if I had 
married any one else but my silly old darling, I 
should have worried him into his grave in a month. 
But you must take me as I am, you know, and let 
me love you in my own way." And from that time 
a great contentment came upon him. With his 
tenderness, which was unfailing, there went forth 
towards her an infinite toleration ; and in time it 
came to pass that he would not have changed the 
love which she gave him " in her own way " for any 
love shaped in accordance with the standard of his 
egotism. What she gave him was all herself, as 
he found, not as once he wished to fashion, her ; 
and it was far better than anything he could have 
made. Sickness fell upon him, and she was the 
gentlest of nurses. Poverty — I mean what was 
poverty to them — descended upon him ; and she 
was the most self-denying of helpmates. She 
who had been wont to have every wish gratified, — 
and to pout, perhaps to murmur, if it were not — 
now subdued herself to all the wishes of another. 
She who had once exacted, now yielded every- 
thing ; and she lovingly confessed, " I am happier 
now, dear, than when I was your spoilt child." 
And I believe that this is anything but an un- 



CLAIMS OF THE BREAD-FINDER. 225 

common story. We blame others and we worry 
ourselves, mainly because, lacking the necessary 
amount of imagination, we cannot go out of our- 
selves — we cannot eat our way out of the hard 
shell of our egotism and look abroad upon the 
manysidedness of human nature. 

I do not mean to imply that all the injustice, 
as between men and women, is committed by the 
former and endured by the latter. I am afraid 
that women are sometimes a little intolerant and 
unjust, simply from a want of right understanding 
of masculine irritations and provocations, and the 
general environments, indeed, of the bread-finder. 
The commonest thing of all is to think that men 
are " cross," — ill-tempered, saturnine, — when they 
are only serious and silent ; perhaps weary and 
careworn. They may have had many crosses out- 
of-doors, but they have no crossness at home, and 
at the very bottom, perhaps, of their solemnity is 
an infinitude of tenderness and love. I do not 
know how I can put my meaning better than in 
the words of a valued friend, to whom years had, 
indeed, brought the toleration for which I am con- 
tending. One of his young daughters had said to 
him, — as young girls are somewhat prone to say, — 

15 



226 ON TOLERATION. 

" I wish I were a man ! " — and he had not answered 
her at once, save with a word or two of dissent, but 
had waited till she was a little older ; and, one day, 
the opportunity having arisen, he spoke to her after 
this fashion : — 

" You remember, darling, when you told me 
that you wished you were a man, and I replied 
that you would soon revoke the wish, if you were 
tried ? I did not then answ r er your ' Why ? ' but 
I will tell you now that you are better able to 
understand me. You say that when I come home 
from my daily official work in London, I some- 
times ' look so cross.' I take a candle, perhaps, 
and go straight to my dressing-room, and when we 
are seated all together at the dinner-table I am 
silent and thoughtful ; and then you think that I 
am cross, and you are all silent because I am. 
But I am only wearied and worried. I have had, 
perhaps, not only much to do, but much to endure. 
You have all of you spent your day very differ- 
ently ; and, therefore, feel very differently at the 
close of it. If I am careworn, my cares are not 
selfish cares. You have, all of you, not only a 
place in them severally, but together you absorb 
them all. If, at times, my losses are heavy and 



MIS I WD ERST A NDINGS. 2 2 7 

prospects appear to be bad, is the anxiety which 
will not suffer me to wear a cheerful countenance 
anxiety for myself alone ? There is so little 
selfishness in it, that sometimes, cowardly as it 
might have been, I have longed to strike my 
colours and to desist from this great battle of life. 
A very little suffices for a man of my years, who 
has outgrown the passions and ambitions of life, 
and longs for nothing more than rest. And if I 
am grave sometimes, when you would wish to see 
me cheerful, it is only because I love you much, 
and am thinking of your happiness. The igno- 
rance which is bliss is denied to us men. I dare 
say you all of you often think that I am un- 
generous, perhaps ' stingy.' You think that I have 
more money than I have got ; that it is more 
easily earned and less speedily spent. You know 
nothing of such things as bad times and high 
prices, and necessary increase of expenditure, as 
you all grow older, without any corresponding 
increase of income ; and you think that I am 
growing meaner every day, when I am only grow- 
ing older, and thinking more than I did of what 
would become of you if I were taken away. You 
think, all of you, that I do not ' live up to my 



2 23 ON TOLERATION. 

income.' But if I did live up to my income, which 
all comes from my professional exertions, what 
would there be for you, when I die ? Do you 
think that, as a matter of mere selfishness, I should 
pinch and hoard ? Does not Self say, ' Let us live 
right royally ? The annual hundreds that go to 
the Insurance Offices had better be spent on 
carriages and horses, and women's dress, and 
autumnal visits to the German Baths. Your 
daughters, when you are dead, may go out as 
governesses, or canvass for admission to some 
Benevolent Society. Let us eat and drink, for 
to-morrow we die ! ' — No language can be more 
intelligible than this language of the ogre Self. 
Do you wish me to be persuaded by it ? 

" This charge of the ways and means, dear, is 
no small matter, I assure you. It is enough to 
make any one grave. When we are travelling, for 
example, in the holidays, it is all holiday to you. 
It goes so easily, that you might almost think, if 
you thought at all about it, that some good fairy 
were administering to all our wants, and ordering 
and arranging everything for us. But you women 
never think anything about it so long as all goes 
well. The railway and steamboat tickets are 



MASCULINE RESPONSIBILITIES. 229 

taken and paid for ; the hotel accommodation is 
provided and hotel bills are * settled,' and you 
have nothing in the world to do but to enjoy 
yourself. All this is quite right, and quite as I 
would wish it to be. But if I look grave some- 
times when you are all merry, or if I do not fall 
in very kindly with all your plans and projects, 
you should not think me a disagreeable travelling 
companion. I remember that when we were at 
Wiesbaden last year, you thought it very unkind 
that I would not go for a week to Homburg. But 
I had to consider whether in that case I should 
have had money enough to carry us all home 
again, and whether, had I been justified in spend- 
ing more money on amusement, I could have 
obtained in sufficient time the necessary remit- 
tances from London. It is w r ell for you all that 
these financial cares will haunt the paternal 
traveller in foreign countries, or some day you 
might all find yourselves stranded very incon- 
veniently on a strange coast. Women, who have 
never been thrown upon their own resources, who 
have never had to fight the battle of life for them- 
selves, can hardly conceive how largely this 
money element enters into all the thoughts of 



230 ON TOLERATION. 

the masculine manager when he is away from 
home. One cannot travel upon credit, you know, 
dear. Even in much smaller matters, men are 
continually brought face to face very painfully 
with the commonplace fact that there is a great 
difference between having money in one's bank 
and having it in one's pocket. I have known 
times, my darling, when some of you have thought 
me nothing better than an old curmudgeon, 
grudging even a small coin, when I had no 
thought of grudging you anything. Among the 
minor miseries of life, there is none greater than 
that of change, I see you don't quite know what 
I mean. It is money change, * small change,' coin, 
currency, sovereigns, half-sovereigns, half-crowns, 
shillings, sixpences. In any dilemma of this kind, 
I have invariably found that no womanly member 
of the family can ever help me. Going out with 
the ' governor,' every one leaves her purse behind. 
And you have, I know, often thought me very 
stingy because I have not given a shilling here or 
a sixpence there, simply because I had no shillings 
or sixpences in my purse. These are very trifling 
matters, but human life is made up of trifles, and 
it is in respect of trivialities of this kind that we 



SEEING WITH OTHER EVES. 231 

are most prone to misjudge each other. And 
wishing, as you do, to be a man, I think it right 
to remind you that in the smaller, as in the greater 
affairs of life, we men have to think for you women, 
to provide our sixpences as well as our thousands of 
pounds ; and that you ought to be tolerant to us, 
if we have not always got them ready. 

" And when your brother Walter was coming 
home from Australia, how pleased you all were — 
how 'jolly' you all thought it. There was not, in 
the estimation of any of you, the least shadow to 
mar the prospect. Some of you then thought it 
unkind, almost unnatural, in me that I did not 
look upon his return with the same unqualified 
satisfaction. But was it less delight to me than to 
any of you to see the dear boy again ? I could 
not help, however, seeing something else. I saw 
loss of money, loss of prospects, much injury to 
him, to you, to me, to the whole family. It threw 
him back years in the march of life — the pursuit of 
independence — and my old brains saw all this very 
clearly, whilst you only saw the dear fellow him- 
self. I do not know how it would have been if 
I had called upon each of you to forego a moiety 
of your allowances, or to do without your annual 



232 ON TOLERATION. 

'outing,' that you might all contribute towards the 
expenses of Walter's visit to England. But, as it 
was, each had your full share of the pleasure, and 
to the lot of the governor fell all the cost. 

" And there are other ways in which you mis- 
judge us. You remember, too bitterly,"— here his 
voice faltered — " that wretched day when poor 
Lilian died. You came in to me at night, and 
found me writing — doing my accustomed w r ork 
amidst books and papers — just — just, it must have 
seemed to you, as if nothing had happened. It 
was natural that you should think so, my darling. 
For you could not know what it cost me, nor why 
I did it. There are things in the world of great 
importance, perhaps to thousands and tens of 
thousands, which depend for their due and regular 
performance upon some humble instrument like 
myself. It was necessary that the work I was 
then doing should be done and delivered at a 
certain place before noon next morning. There 
was no one who could do it for me. However 
repugnant to my nature, it was necessary that I 
should do it, even though I should be thought 
hard and unfeeling for doing it at such a time. 
And this is another of the penalties of manhood. 



WORK IN SORROW. 233 

"But of this I do not complain. The great 
and good God, even of His infinite mercy, sends 
these burdens and distractions to us men in the 
midst of our sorrow. The necessity of exertion is, 
doubtless, salutary to us. Even out of the very 
causes of our grief there proceeds much to be 
done. ' Men must work and women must weep ; ' 
and it is good for us to work, though we weep at 
our work hot tears from the heart. We must 
order and arrange everything even for the mourn- 
ful accessories of death ; and there are many 
amongst us, and not only those who are bread- 
finders by the sweat of their brow, who, in periods 
of great sorrow, are constrained to toil the more, 
because the earnings of toil must be greater to 
meet the larger demands of the season of tribula- 
tion. You think that we suffer less, because we 
must be up and doing. It will never fall to your 
lot, my dear, to know what that conflict is. But 
you, who have not to work, when great tribulation 
is upon you, must think kindly of us who have, 
and not fancy that we do not sorrow bitterly, 
because we sorrow differently from you. Only the 
Father ' who seeth in secret ' can tell how often in 
anguish of spirit we are compelled to cease from 



234 ON TOLERATION. 

our work — how often, though the pen be in the 
hand, there is a mist of tears before the paper 
so that nothing can be traced. We men try to 
' keep up ' before you, darling ; but you must not 
think us heartless because we do — because we try- 
even to lead your thoughts sometimes away from 
the one great subject of your sorrows. It is the 
most painful part of our duties ; but, perhaps, also 
the most essential. And even the gross necessity 
of eating and drinking at such times seems to be 
heartless in its fulfilment. But those who have 
work to do must be strong to do it. And, believe 
me, there are few amongst us who in times of great 
sorrow would not rather lay ourselves down and 
turn our faces to the wall and i indulge the luxury 
of grief' and refuse to be comforted. Men do 
not complain that they cannot do this, but 
those who can do it must not wrong us by 
thinking that we do not suffer. We only ask 

for a little Toleration " 

Thus spoke the father to his daughter. And it 
seems to me that there is much in what he said that 
women may take to their hearts — especially when 
they are prone to think that men are stern and 
unfeeling: "heartless," perhaps, is the favourite 



DROWNING SORROW. 235 

word — simply because the outward expressions 
are so different. I knew a great statesman who, 
when sorely smitten by tidings of the death of his 
absent wife, cried in despair to those who would 
fain have stood aloof in silent sympathy and 
respect for his heavy sorrow, " Work ; bring me 
work ; you cannot bring me too much ! " And, 
immersed in the affairs of a great empire, he strove 
to find in high intellectual efforts that opiate for 
the heart w T hich men of lower natures might have 
sought — elsezvhere. Every reader knows the mean- 
ing of that last word ; and there are few, who 
cannot instance, as I have instanced above, some 
examples of men whom grief of this same best 
kind has driven to the " drowning in the cup," 
until reason has been drowned with the sorrow 7 , 
and only the brute has remained. " Give strong 
drink unto him who is ready to perish, and wine 
unto those that be of heavy hearts. Let him 
drink and forget his poverty, and remember his 
misery no more." No man need be ashamed to 
confess that in seasons of trouble he has derived 
strength and endurance from wine — or from what, 
among poorer people, is the representative of 
w r ine. I have heard a resort to such stimulants, 



236 ON TOLERATION. 

or sedatives, or whatever they may be, stigmatized, 
in general language, as degrading, and so it is, 
assuredly, in excess. But it is not the only one 
of God's good gifts to man that is sometimes fear- 
fully abused. 

But this has expanded into a digression ; and 
I purposed to say something more about the femi- 
nine idea of the relation between man and woman, 
in respect of financial concerns. I do not know 
very precisely what are the provisions of the 
Married Women's Property Bill, but I have talked 
the matter over with women, at odd times, and I 
have gathered a notion of the view which is taken 
by some amiable casuists. It seems to be the idea 
that they are to have uncontrolled authority over 
their own money, and to leave their husbands to 
pay their debts. They say in effect to the bread- 
finder — " What is yours is mine — what's mine is 
my own." Indeed, the general feminine idea of 
what is called "an allowance" includes the assump- 
tion that the person granting it is to pay just the 
same for everything, for which the said allowance 
is disbursed, as if no independent arrangement 
existed. I heard a charming story of husband and 
wife the other day, so illustrative of this that I am 



WOMANLY ONE-SID EDNESS. 237 

minded to repeat it. The wife had said laughingly 
to the husband — they were young people and 
sufficiently "well-to-do" — that he spent much 
more pocket-money than she did, and that he was 
altogether an extravagant fellow : so in the even- 
ing, when he came home, he brought a purse-full 
of sovereigns, and taking what remained to each 
-from their last supplies, equalized the two little 
piles to a shilling, and said, " Now we'll start fair, 
darling, and see who is bankrupt first." At the 
end of a w r eek, they agreed playfully to compare 
notes ; and it was found that the wife had a few 
shillings more than the husband, upon which she 
was very jubilant and triumphant, and told him 
that she had always known him to be an extra- 
vagant fellow. "But, my child," he said, depre- 
catingly, "remember that when we have gone out 
together, I have paid the expenses of both out of 

my money. There were the railway fares to , 

and the flys and cabs, and the little dinner we had 
at Richmond, and the stalls at the Haymarket, 
and the Crystal Palace on Saturday — all have 
been paid for out of my money ; and there is that 
pretty new bonnet on your head, in which you 
look so charming." Upon which she lifted up her 



238 ON TOLERATION. 

hands and made a mouth at him— (it was a very 
pretty one ) — and cried out, " Oh, I am ashamed of 
you ! You, indeed, to talk of chivalry, and to 
think for a moment of taking a poor little woman 
out with you, and expecting her to pay her share 
of the expenses ! What will the men of the period 
come to next ? " Of course there was no appeal 
against this. He could only put his arms round 
her and kiss her, and confess that he was an 
" extravagant fellow." 

There is one more point of view from which I 
would regard this great question of Toleration 
before I lay aside the pen. I have said that I 
would eschew politics and religion, and I shall not 
depart from my promise, though I may approach 
nearly the forbidden ground, if I say that amongst 
us there is a great want of National Toleration. 
As a nation, perhaps, we English are the most 
intolerant people in the world. We go about 
everywhere in a spirit of egotism, which clings to 
us like the poisoned robe of the centaur, and 
strikes the venom to our very marrow. We visit 
foreign countries, and so far from doing at Rome 
what is done at Rome, we think that every Roman 



NATIONAL INTOLERANCE. 239 

should do exactly like ourselves. Now I do not 

mean to say that we should accommodate ourselves 
too readily to foreign habits and usages. Of 
course there must be a limit to such adaptations. 
For example, an Englishman in New Zealand is 
not bound "to dine on cold man." But that is no 
reason why we should be very severe even on the 
Xew Zealander, who, having an instinct for flesh- 
eating, was originally driven, by want of mutton 
and beef, to dish up his fellow-men as savoury 
food. We are wont to call all, who differ from us 
in their way of life, savages and barbarians, forget- 
ting that the time was when we painted our bodies, 
and did other very preposterous things, which, 
although conventionally out of date, are not in- 
trinsically any greater absurdities than some of 
those which we encourage and foster in the present 
day. And why do we not take account of the 
conditions of men's birth and training, of the 
terrible drawbacks and hindrances, almost the im- 
possibilities, which beset some men, before we 
describe them as vile and degraded. Can we 
expect an Asiatic prince, reared in the Zenana, to 
resemble one brought up amidst all the ennobling 
influences of Christian life? Can we expect his 



240 ON TOLERATION. 

Highness the of — to be in all things like 

unto "Albert the Good ?" If he be no worse than 
others of his kind, we should tolerate him. If he 
be better, we should respect him. But do we ? 
No. He is unlike ourselves ; and, therefore, we 
denounce him. 

And w T e do this, on a large scale, concerning 
affairs of Government and modes of administra- 
tion, not less than, on a small scale, in respect of 
social habits and fashions, and personal vagaries, 
and the vanities of life. I chanced not long ago, 
in the house of a friend, who holds an official 
appointment, to take up some blue-books relating 
to India, which I found less dreary reading than I 
expected, and from them I learnt that our "goody" 
Government had been lecturing, if not threatening, 
some of the neighbouring states, for the monstrous 
offence of bolstering up their revenues by means of 
Government monopolies.* A great fervour of 
Free-trade seemed to be upon our Government 
functionaries, who were eager, as shown in the 
correspondence I was reading, to teach true prin- 
ciples of commercial policy to native potentates 

* There are, doubtless, some readers whom I need not tell that 
this " friend" was a poetical licence. (1870.) 



NATIONAL INTOLERANCE. 241 

on the outskirts of civilization, as in Burmah and 
Ladakh, and to sweep away all such abominations 
as protective duties. With the characteristic in- 
tolerance of new proselytes, we were condemning 
with fiery zeal all who happened to be a few 
lessons behind ourselves. Indeed, it seemed, to 
my limited comprehension of the matter, that our 
want of toleration went even further than this, 
inasmuch as that we were censuring heathen 
Governments for doing that which we Christians 
had not only recently done, but which we actually 
then were and are now doing in a more lamentable 
and injurious manner. And I thought, perhaps, 
that an Indian Punch might not unfitly represent 
the Viceroy sitting on a well-padded chair, in- 
scribed " Opium Revenue " and " Salt Revenue," 
and teaching, birch in hand, a class of native 
princes to decline the noun-substantive Monopoly. 
One might have a wallet inscribed u Oil," another 
" Timber," a third " Shawl-wool," and the like, 
but none equal in bulk to the cushions of the 
chair on which the pedagogue sits to insist upon 
the duty of free-trade in all these articles of com- 
merce. And on the walls of the school-room 
might hang an historical picture of good Mr. John 

16 



242 ON TOLERATION. 

Company building up our Anglo-Indian empire on 
a broad basis of Monopoly.* Somehow or other 
we always do forget our own weaknesses and in- 
firmities of past days, and are intolerant in the 
extreme towards the very errors which we have 
scarcely yet abandoned. I have often heard it 
said — and, indeed, having once held a military 
commission, I have some experience of the fact — 
that no military officer is so intolerant of the 
offences of the privates under him, as the man 
who has himself risen from the Ranks. And so 
it is both in personal and in national affairs. 
States and individuals are alike intolerant of a 
condition of things out of which they have only 
recently emerged. 

And this brings me back to the point from 



* I observe, whilst writing this, that a Member of the House of 
Commons has given notice of his intention to bring before Parlia- 
ment next session the subject of the large amount of revenue derived 
from the sale of opium by the Indian Government. But this is only 
another instance of want of Toleration. Governments, like indivi- 
duals, "must live ;" and we must not scan too nicely the manner in 
which revenue is raised. It is not very long since, in our own 
country, light and air were heavily taxed, under the name of 
"windows. " Taxation in any shape is an evil, but it is an inevitable 
one, and we ought not to be over-severe on others who put it into 
shapes different from our own. 



"A LABOUR OF LOVE." 243 

which I started ; and, therefore, warns me that it 
is time to conclude. This propensity to condemn 
others is commonly strongest in those who have a 
sense of their own infirmities. It is the inherent 
disposition to — 

" Compound for sins we are inclined to 
By damning those we have no mind to." 

But " if, instead of blaming men " — and here I 
quote another, the ever-tolerant editor of Coleridge s 
Letters, — " for what they are, and are made to be, 
we occupied and interested ourselves with earnest 
inquiries into the causes of the evils we deplore, 
with a view r to their removal, it cannot be doubted 
that this real labour of love, if carried on with and 
through the spirit of love, would in its very endea- 
vour include much of the good sought to be 
obtained. To me, it seems that the greatest 
amount of benefit will result from the labours or 
the exertions of those who unite the good to 
others with that w 7 hich is — has been made — plea- 
surable to themselves ; from those who seek to 
make what is genial and joyous to themselves 
more genial and more joyous to others. This is 
a labour in which not merely some favourite 



244 ON TOLERATION:— 

crotchet, some abstract opinion, or even sincere 
and honest convictions, are engaged : it is one in 
which the best, the purest, the highest sympathies 
of our nature are enlisted in the service and in the 
promotion of those enjoyments and of those prac- 
tical occupations from which our own well-being 
has resulted, or with which it has been associated." 
There can be no better teaching than this. To a 
certain extent we know what is, but we do not 
know why it is. We see the effect, but are blind 
to the cause. Only the sufferer himself can com- 
pute the daily, the hourly temptations and pro- 
vocations which lead some men — and women — 
astray, whilst others are not assailed. I remember, 
some years ago, to have read in a novel, doubtless 
now forgotten, that a certain stiff, wizened old 
maid, who could scarcely have been even good- 
looking in her youth, exclaimed, when some 
reference to the subject was made in conversation, 
— " Oh ! virtue is very easy," — upon which a poor 
little woman (it w r as on board a Rhine boat) whose 
whole life had been one of temptation, hearing the 
remark, walked away, with her sweet, though care- 
worn face, her charming petite rounded figure and 
elastic step, and heaving a deep sigh, said to her- 



OF DRESS. 245 

self, " Oh, but virtue is not easy ! " And so it is ; 
and so it ever will be ! 

" What's done we partly may compute, 
But know not what's resisted." 

[A ugust — Septem ber, 1869.] 

Note. — I have said in this essay (p. 221) that " I would not give 
much for a woman who is not fond of dress," and more to the same 
effect laudatory of this supposed "woman's weakness." It is sug- 
gested that this passage might be regarded as a plea for extravagance 
in dress, which, doubtless, is among the besetting evils of the time. 
But to be fond of dress and to be extravagant in dress are two very 
different things. Women who are extravagant in dress are often 
very careless and wasteful ; they show that they are not really fond 
of dress by the manner in which they treat it ; casting aside or 
destroying their dresses, one after another, as the whim seizes 
them; whilst others, uniformly careful and neat, spend only half the 
money, and make twice as good an appearance. This is the come- 
liness of which I have spoken in the text, which is only another name 
for carefulness, and which bespeaks, as I have said, in women, 
orderly habits and a desire to please. But it is shocking to think of 
the amount of money wasted by others on fine dresses, without the 
attainment, after all, of the great object of being w//-dressed. The 
best-dressed woman is the one who dresses most according to her 
station, and who evinces her fondness for dress by taking the best 
care of it. (1870.) 



( 2 4 6 ) 



REST. 

I HAD a long illness at the end of last year— not 
dangerous, not very painful, but compelling me, as 
an indispensable aid to recovery, to keep stead- 
fastly to my bed. Such a mischance had not 
befallen me for twenty-five years. I am habitually 
an early riser, spending little time a-bed, and it 
seemed strange to me at first, with a strangeness 
not unmingled with self-reproach, to hear the cry of 
the milkman from between the sheets ; but this 
soon wore away, and there came over me a calm 
satisfaction with my lot — something more than 
mere patience. And now I look back to the time 
with a feeling almost of regret, as though I should 
not much deplore the necessity of spending it all 
over again. It is true that all the conditions were 
in my favour. I had physicians as wise as they 
were kind, the best and brightest of nurses, and 
the sympathy of a few loving friends. And I had 



"ENFORCED PAUSES EV EIEE" 247 

what I had not known for many years, something 
nearly approaching to — Rest. 

I had a fanciful notion at the time — and I have 
not ceased yet from the indulgence of the thought 
— that the " good Fairy" w r hich watches over me, 
seeing that I would not of my own motion cease 
from labour, had purposely prostrated me that I 
might rest mind and body from the ceaseless work 
of years, and rescue what little good might still 
be left in me for use in a later day. Not long ago, 
some papers were written, in a popular periodical, 
on " Enforced Pauses in Life." I could not, at the 
time, make a pause in life to read them ; but I was 
much struck by the title, and I often feel an 
extreme amount of thankfulness for the occurrence 
and recurrence of these enforced pauses. They 
may last for only five minutes, or they may last 
for an hour, a day, a week, a month. It is impos- 
sible to calculate the good that they do. In the 
midst of a hard bout of writing-work, just as I am, 
perhaps, getting into a state of congestion, I miss 
a certain paper, or I cannot find a certain book. 
I am compelled to rise from my chair, to change 
my position, to go into another room, to spend a 
quarter of an hour, perhaps, in an active search, 



248 REST. 

which may, after all, be unsuccessful. But the 
labour has not been labour lost ; I am all the 
better for it ; there has been some rest of the 
brain. Then, again, there is a stoppage on my 
line of railway : I am detained for an hour on my 
way to business. I spend the time between looking 
out of window and reading the advertisements in 
my newspaper ; I take in a succession of entirely 
new ideas, not one of which may be of much 
value : but I have rested for a while ; perhaps, I 
have slept a little in the course of my detention. 
I have been ordered to halt and to stand at ease ; 
I have been compelled to pause, whether I would 
or not ; and however much I have chafed at the 
commencement, I have always acknowledged, at 
last, that the hour has been well spent. For rest 
is a thing to be done, as well as work ; and if we 
are disinclined to do it, we should be thankful that 
the " Providence which shapes our ends " some- 
times compels us thereto, in spite of ourselves. 
But for these occasional compulsions, I might, long 
ere this, have been in a churchyard or a mad- 
house. At least, I am convinced — and the con- 
viction brings a strong feeling of gratitude in its 
train — that if I had always had my own way, I 



THE SICK BED. 249 

should not now be writing this essay, enjoying the 
soft summer air, and the sweet odour of the roses 
in my garden. What we are wont to call mis- 
chances are commonly blessings in disguise. And 
so I thought that as these small pauses had not 
been enough for me, it had been beneficently 
ordained that I should be laid in my bed for six 
weeks and ordered to take my rest. 

So I took it, not merely uncomplainingly, but 
in the main gratefully. And I have been thinking 
that perhaps nothing but a decided attack of 
illness, placing me under the strict discipline of 
the faculty, would have had the same beneficial 
effect. We are wont to coquette with slight ail- 
ments. Admonitions of the gentler kind are too 
often unheeded. Nature benignantly indicates the 
time to pause ; but man, stiff-necked and pre- 
sumptuous, too often disregards these warnings, 
and instead of ceasing to work, works badly against 
the grain. Then, again, as to voluntary cessation 
from labour, there are conditions to be observed 
with respect to the perfect realization of the idea 
of a holiday, which some men, by reason partly 
of their natural dispositions, partly of their 
adventitious surroundings, can rarely fulfil. The 



250 AEST. 

nominal holiday often brings with it anything but 
genuine rest. Too frequently a man's business 
pursues him into the country, haunts him at the 
sea-side, crosses the Channel with him, sits upon 
his back wheresoever he goes. " This is his own 
fault," it may be said. Nay, rather it is his mis- 
fortune. It is the result commonly of a conscien- 
tious feeling, that what a man can do he ought to 
do with all the power that is in him ; and that he 
has no right, for the sake of personal ease and 
enjoyment, to lose sight of his appointed work, 
unless he be perfectly assured in his own mind 
that it can be done equally well by others in his 
absence. I have heard much of the " happy 
faculty" of getting thoroughly rid of the burden 
of work, " shaking it off" is the favourite expres- 
sion ; I do not doubt that it is a very happy 
faculty to the possessor, but the happiness may 
be confined to himself. I do not wish to be mis- 
understood, and, therefore, I must discriminate a 
little in this place. There are times and seasons 
when it would be a mere w T aste of self not to get 
rid of all cares of business, all thoughts of one's 
work. If one can do nothing, it is needless self- 
torture to kick against the pricks of the inevitable. 



" SHAKING-OFF BUSINESS" 251 

There can be no self-reproach where there is no 
power to do otherwise. 

What I mean is best shown by a familiar illus- 
tration. Whatever may be the business to be 
done, whatever the difficulties to be surmounted, 
whatever the cares and anxieties attending them, 
when business hours are over on Saturday 
evening, when the last post has come in and gone 
out, a man feels that he can do nothing more till 
Monday morning. It is out of his own hands. 
God's law and man's law alike decree his quies- 
cence. To endeavour to cast out, during that 
blessed interval, all corroding thoughts, is surely 
the duty of all of us, as it is a privilege to be 
suffered to accomplish it. And I am disposed to 
think that there are few to whom this privilege is 
not mercifully vouchsafed. I have heard men, 
upon whom the burden of the world has sat by no 
means lightly, declare that they always sleep 
better on Saturday night and wake later on 
Sunday morning than at any other time of the 
week ; and that although Monday morning amply 
revenges itself, the sabbatical repose of the dies 
11011 strengthens them for the struggles of the 
coming week and keeps them from breaking down. 



252 fiEST. 

I shall speak of this more fully in another place. 
I desire here only to illustrate the difference be- 
tween enforced and wilful quiescence. Thus to 
" shake off business,'' when no business can be 
done, is a privilege if it come naturally to us, and 
wisdom if it be attained by discipline of the mind. 
I can see no use in opening letters of business on 
Saturday night, that cannot be answered and 
acted upon until Monday morning. To do so 
may give one a troubled Sunday, without helping 
the matter in hand. But when the banks and the 
marts and the exchanges are open ; when men are 
buying and selling, borrowing and lending ; when 
the public offices are in full departmental activity ; 
when statesmen are meeting and legislators are 
babbling, and judges are sitting on the judgment- 
seat, it may be neither a privilege to be able to 
shake off business, nor wisdom to encourage the 
faculty. To lose a single post, to be half-an-hour 
late at a certain place, may make all the difference 
between success and failure. That which brings 
ease of mind is the knowledge that we have done 
our best — that it is not in our power to do any- 
thing more than we have done, or differently from 
what we have done. But there is the bitterness of 



DISTURBING INFLUENCES. 253 

self-reproach in the thought, that if we had not 
yielded to some infirmity or some temptation, 
some self-indulgence of the moment, causing us to 
lose a train or to miss a post — or, on a larger scale 
of pleasure-seeking, to be at a distance from the 
seat of business, when we might be close at hand 
— everything might have turned out differently, to 
our contentment instead of to our despair. 

We cannot, unfortunately, get over the fact 
that all the tendencies of the age are the very 
reverse of favourable to Rest. I should be a mere 
Goth, an outer barbarian of the worst kind, if I 
did not thankfully acknowledge the benefits which 
the present generation derives from the almost 
magical rapidity with which both thought and 
matter are conveyed from one spot to another. 
Communication by post has been wonderfully im- 
proved, and the electric telegraph is a great insti- 
tution. But posts and telegraphs are among the 
disturbing accessories of life ; and a man, con- 
nected with business of any kind, official, profes- 
sional, or commercial, can hardly expect to enjoy 
anything like genuine Rest, so long as he is within 
reach of the post or the telegraph. The telegraph 
now, under post-office development, is invading the 



254 REST. 

remotest districts. Happening some weeks ago to 
visit an obscure village or townlet in South Wales, 
I was surprised to see the posts and wires following 
the rural road, miles away from the station, and 
thus bringing London within a few minutes' dis- 
tance of my retreat. In a little time, I suppose 
that there will be no place in which the telegraph 
cannot find you out. I have thought sometimes, 
in my search after rest, whether I would not, on 
leaving London for an autumnal holiday, leave 
directions behind me to forward no letters or 
telegrams, or, as a certain preventive to the 
despatch of all unwelcome missives, to leave no 
address behind me. I envy, if I do not applaud, 
those who can do such things — who can thus cut 
themselves off from the outside world altogether, 
and feel no misgivings of danger. Of the faculty 
of abstraction I have spoken above. I am now 
writing of the permissive or preventive circum- 
stances. And it unfortunately happens that the 
very men, to whom perfect repose is most essen- 
tial, are those whom hostile circumstances rarely 
suffer to enjoy it. They may go to distant places 
in the holidays, but they cannot deny the ap- 
proaches of the post and the telegraph ; and if 



FREEDOM FROM INTERRUPTION. 255 

they did, their apprehensions and anxieties and 
self-reproaches would give them as little genuine 
rest as their letters and their messages and the 
office-boxes which are sent down to them. It is 
best, therefore, I am disposed to think, as most 
contributing to rest in such circumstances, cheer- 
fully to face your business, to do such work, or to 
issue such orders for its doing, as will keep the 
wheels going without accidents ; to get over it 
every day as expeditiously as possible ; and then 
to give yourself up to recreation and amusement. 
Change of air and change of scene may do much 
for a man, and it is no small thing to be able to 
work by an open window 7 , with the fresh air of the 
departing summer breathing upon him, and fair 
fields and smiling flowers to meet his eyes, when 
he lifts them from his papers. Besides, there is 
a blessed immunity from the distracting, at times 
almost maddening, interruptions to w r hich, at the 
head-quarters of your business, you are always 
subject — legitimate interruptions from clerks and 
clients, and illegitimate incursions and intrusions 
from the idle world, barbarians regardless of the 
value of time, coming on their own private business 
or on no business at all, impervious to hints of all 



256 REST. 

kinds, from covert appeals to ill-disguised re- 
proaches. There is gain in the direction of Rest 
from the absence of these disturbing influences, 
which is sufficient answer to those who thanklessly 
exclaim : " I might as well have remained at 
office." Better, again I say, under these happier 
conditions, to do one's work, than to be accessible 
to continually recurring apprehensions of disaster 
and the stingings of a lively conscience. 

It is the absence, I am inclined to think, of 
these sharp twinges of self-reproach, which, to a 
man encumbered with the affairs of the world, 
makes a period of sickness the nearest approach to 
a period of Rest to which he is ever likely to attain, 
until he has rid himself of all fleshly encumbrances. 
There is something very comforting in utter help- 
lessness. It is God's will that you should for 
a while be inactive — and there's an end of it. 
Satisfied that all that comes from the Almighty 
disposer of events is for the best, you resign 
yourself to his bidding, as a child ; and with this 
childlike confidence come childlike tastes and in- 
clinations, and something like a childlike state of 
intelligence : the mind, like the body, eschewing 
strong diet and delighting in the mildest nutri- 



MILD READING. 257 

ment. I am one of those who, in seasons of health 
and strength, live upon meat and wine. I eschew 
delicate cates and meek beverages. I have a horror 
of slops. I thrive best upon heroic aliment. But 
there are pauses in men's lives when the heroic is 
at a discount. Mind and body are alike in this. 
At such times I have found solace in the perusal 
of books of the milder sort, which in full health 
I should have regarded as the most insipid of all 
possible reading — books of the humdrum order, 
such as meek domestic stories about goody people, 
who neither do nor suffer anything that is not 
done or suffered by people of one's own acquaint- 
ance every day of the year. I would not class 
among these books such a work as Miss Marti- 
neau's Deerbrook, which is good reading at all 
times. I read it once, for the second or third 
time, during a severe attack of the gout, under a 
continual sense of gratitude to the writer. It is, 
indeed, a great book, with as much meaning in it 
as Bulwer's Rienzi, to which in my mind I have 
frequently compared it. Dr. Hope is a sort of 
Rienzi of middle-class life in England. Widely 
different as are the costumes, the scenic effects, all 
the external accessories, there is in both the same 

17 



2q3 REST. 

moral groundwork — the same truth wrought out 
by different means. The variableness of popular 
favour is finely illustrated by each writer. But I 
could read one when I could not read the other. 
Indeed, I tried, on my sick bed, last year, to read 
the Last of the Barons, and I found that the food 
was too strong for me. But I read with pleasure, 
at the time, some mild stories of everyday life at 
home, of which I do not now remember a word — 
stories that take a man placidly just a very little 
way out of the environs of self, and awaken a 
calm, genial, sympathetic interest, which is gently 
stimulating to the system, without disturbing one's 
rest. Even children's books are sometimes plea- 
sant reading at such times — especially school-boy 
stories — such, for instance, as Charles Dickens' 
Old Cheeseman ; for, in truth, a sick man is little 
more than a child. At such periods, indeed, there 
is much pleasure in going back some forty years 
to one's school-boy days, and wondering what has 
become of one's old schoolfellows — what they have 
done in the w r orld, what they are like. Some, of 
course, have turned up at odd times and in odd 
places, with friendly recognitions ; and what delight 
has there been in the renovata juvenilis — what 



PLEASANT MEMORIES. 259 

wonderful Rest in the interchange of old re- 
miniscences — the revivification of boyish jokes 
between the Dean, the Queen's Counsel, and the 
Chief of an Official Department — fondly remem- 
bered by each other, with pleasant memories of 
fair young faces and light agile figures, and 
buoyant spirits that nothing could check ! Such 
reunions are worth many a hard and toilsome 
passage in life, and the more so that they com- 
monly come upon us unawares. But I was minded 
to speak of these blessed reunions, in the spirit, 
not in the flesh — wishing to say that, w T hen neces- 
sitated to cease from labour, and to find some 
pleasant occupation for the mind, I have often 
derived, from reminiscences of old times, especially 
of those embraced by the academic period, infinite 
solace and repose. At such times, in the life- 
pauses of illness, or in intervals of broken rest 
(which, as we grow older, become unfortunately 
more frequent) I have lived over again and again 
those blessed periods of 

"Youth, 

When life was luxury, and friendship truth," 

and have never become weary of the retrospect. 



260 REST. 

Strange is it that these memories of our early days 
grow more vivid as we advance in life. Perhaps 
it is that, as the fiercer excitements of the heyday 
of manhood subside under the influence of age 
and infirmity, we live less in the present, and give 
ourselves more leisure to review the past. Our 
first affections, out of the family circle, are com- 
monly given to some school-friend ; and though, 
in after years, our paths may be far apart, and we 
may lose sight altogether of the first objects of 
our love, an enduring impression is made upon the 
heart, which Time cannot efface. Perhaps, on the 
whole, pleasant as are the meetings of which I 
have spoken, it is best for such school-friends 
(speaking of them as something distinct from mere 
school-fellows) not to meet as adults — not to have 
anything to mar the mind-picture of the bright- 
faced, supple-limbed boy, all aglow with healthful 
exercise and innocent excitement, shouldering his 
bat and walking down to the scorer to learn how 
many runs he has made. He may have gone the 
right way, or he may have gone the wrong way. 
He may have developed into a bishop, or he may 
have sunk into a sot. In either case, he is not our 
little Bright-face ; and it is a pity that the remi- 



SICKNESS A RENOVATOR. 261 

niscence should be spoilt by any disfigurements of 
mature reality. 

It may appear to some, and not unreasonably, 
that this notion of mine, that for a man, in the 
full swing of business, to realize anything like 
an approximation to rest, he must be prostrated 
on a bed of sickness, is not unlike the idea of 
Elia's Chinaman, that it was necessary to burn 
down a house to obtain the luxury of roast-pig. 
Perhaps it is. But there is nothing of which I 
am more assured, in my own mind, than that, 
in the midst of an active, perhaps an over-active, 
career (I speak of cerebral, not muscular, activi- 
ties), to be laid aside by no will of your own, 
but by the ruling of One who better knows what 
is good for you, may be in your case, as it has 
been in thousands of other cases, the salvation 
both of your body and of your mind. If I were 
the ruling principle of a life-assurance society, I 
should put the question to the would-be assurer — 
" When did you have your last illness ? " with a 
view to ascertain the danger rather of unbroken 
health (or the simulacrum of it) than the sup- 
posed warnings of occasional attacks of sickness. 
I should be always suspicious of men who are 



262 REST. 

" never ill." I have seen such men snap suddenly, 
for want of that relief from incessant tension which, 
to some natures, can only come unbidden. The 
unbending of the bow is forced upon us when we 
are really sick ; and it is bountifully provided in 
such genuine disorderments, that, with the debility 
of the body engendered at such times, should come 
also a corresponding debility of mind, or rather 
a certain obtuseness thereof, an absence of that 
sensitiveness to external influences, which is in- 
separable from perfect, or even slightly impaired, 
health ; and from this absence of the vivida vis of 
other times comes the nearest approach to Rest 
which active men are capable of enjoying. And 
next to this, in their salutary effects on overworked 
man, are the conditions of the Sabbath. 

I have spoken incidentally of the Christian's 
day of rest, and promised to return to the subject. 
I think with a shudder, sometimes, of what life 
would be without Sundays — if day after day the 
great wheel of the w r orld went round with its 
ceaseless clatter, never a rest in motion, never a 
pause in sound. These are mere secular essays ; 
they do not aspire even to the dignity of lay- 
sermons. What am I that I should dare to write 



SUN DA VS. 263 

otherwise than as a worldling ? I speak of the 
Sabbath only in its original meaning, as a word 
that signifies Rest. And, in this sense, it is by 
most men, and ought to be by all, esteemed as 
the very greatest of all the blessings which the 
Almighty benevolence has bestowed upon Man. 
The worst Sabbath-breaker of all is the ingrate 
who is not thankful when the Sabbath comes 
round. He may go to Church three times a day, 
and be austere in all outward observances, but he 
breaks the Sabbath in his heart if he rejoices when 
it is over. There are many kinds of worship, and 
I am humbly disposed to think that the giving of 
thanks is not the least acceptable of them. If it 
be true that laborare est orare, we are praying 
during six days of the week, and may devote the 
seventh to praise. He who thoroughly enjoys his 
day of rest lives from morning to night in a state 
of thankfulness to the Almighty ; the incense of 
praise is continually rising from his heart. I 
do not envy the man who does not hail the 
advent of Sunday, and rejoice in the Rest which 
it vouchsafes. 

I am not forgetful that among those who have 
professed this want of appreciation of the great 



264 REST. 

weekly restorative, for which I am so devoutly 
thankful, once lived and loved one, of whom to 
write at all is to write tenderly and affectionately : 
that gentle hero, that Titanic weakling — Charles 
Lamb. It was not well of him to write in one of the 
most delightful of his Essays: — " I had my Sundays 
to myself ; but Sundays, admirable as the institution 
of them is for purposes of worship, are for that very- 
reason the worst adapted for days of unbending 
and recreation. In particular there is a gloom 
for me attendant upon city Sundays, a weight 
in the air. I miss the cheerful cries of London, 
the music and the ballad-singers, the buzz and 
stirring music of the streets. Those eternal bells 
depress me. The closed shops repel me. Prints, 
pictures, all the glittering and endless succession of 
knacks and gewgaws, and ostentatiously-displayed 
wares of tradesmen, which make a week-day saunter 
through the less busy parts of the metropolis so 
delightful, are shut out. No bookstalls deliciously 
to idle over. No busy faces to recreate the idle 
man, who contemplates them ever passing by — 
the very face of business a charm by contrast to 
his temporary relaxation from it. Nothing to be 
seen but unhappy countenances, or half-happy at 



LONDON SUN DA YS. 265 

best — of emancipated 'prentices and little trades- 
folk, with here and there a servant-maid who 
has got leave to go out, who, slaving all the week, 
with the habit has lost almost the capacity of 
enjoying a free hour, and livelily expressing the 
hollowness of a day's pleasuring. The very strol- 
lers in the fields on that day look anything but 
comfortable." Half - serious, half - sportive, and 
wholly wrong ! It appears to me, too, that there 
is something of an anachronism in it. Written 
in the character of the " Superannuated Man," 
it relates to a past period of existence, when the 
writer had " a desk in Mincing Lane" — otherwise 
in Leadenhall Street — and yet it seems to be 
imbued with the spirit of superannuation, and to 
express rather the sentiments of the " idle man " 
than of the busy one. Perhaps he would not 
have written in this strain whilst he was harnessed 
to the go-cart of the Accounts' Office of the East 
India Company, and had only his Sundays for 
holidays. It is surely abundant compensation 
for the closed bookstalls and the silent hurdigur- 
dies, that you can rise in the morning with the 
delightful sense that there is nothing that you 
are compelled to do. If it be any luxury to 



266 REST. 

you to lie late a-bed, you may do it. You need 
not look at your watch, every ten minutes, lest 
you should miss the train (in Mr. Lamb's day it 
was the coach). You need not grudge yourself an 
extra quarter of an hour over your breakfast. 
You need not be disquieted by the thought that 
you have got your slippers on instead of your 
boots (in Mr. Lamb's time, the disquieting thought 
was connected with the buttoning of the gaiters). 
In a word, you need not be in a hurry. Is this no 
small thing in itself? Is it not rest — rest from 
that unceasing battle with Time that we are 
waging all through the week-days ? For my own 
part, it is the quietude of Sunday that I so much 
enjoy — the cessation of the postman's rap, of the 
tradesman's call, of the street-cries, of the refer- 
ences to Bradshaw. I can sit still when I like, 
I can sleep when I like, and I have time to be 
thankful. 

It is true that I commonly spend my Sundays 
a little way in the country, or rather, a little out 
of town, for in these days of perpetual sedification 
the country is not easily reached. If you pitch 
your tent where there is a pleasant prospect of 
green fields and orchards, and you can see the 



SUNDAY IN THE SUBURBS, 267 

cows grazing from your windows at all times 
and the apple-blossoms whitening the ground 
beneath them in the spring and early summer, 
the speculative builder soon plants opposite to 
you a steam-engine and a sawing-machine, exor- 
cises houses, with demoniacal rapidity, from the 
bowels of the earth, and blocks out all of nature 
but the skies. There is some good, be it said, even 
in this — for it is a blessing, bountifully tending 
to Rest, to be suffered to know the worst. When 
all is done that can be done to your despite, there 
is nothing more for you to fear or fidget about ; 
and it is better, perhaps, to know that you can 
never see those fields and apple-blossoms again 
from your windows, than to live haunted by con- 
tinual apprehensions of losing them. We soon get 
reconciled, as I have before said, to the inevitable. 
I purpose to say something presently about the 
Rest that comes from knowing the worst. I am 
now, when not hindered by my digressional in- 
firmity, writing of the blessed Rest of Sundays. 
And I was proceeding to say that though now, in 
spite of the builder, I can sit on Sundays under my 
vine and saunter among flowers, it has not been 
always so ; and that I have spent years of Sundays 



268 REST. 

in town, under nearly every residential condition 
known to our middle-class humanity — in comfort- 
able family dwelling-houses, in lodging-house 
"drawing-room floors," in chambers of Inns of 
Court, ay, and in the city proper, hard by that 
so-called " Mincing Lane," whereof Mr. Lamb 
discourses ; and yet I protest that I have never 
failed to rise from my bed, lighter and happier on 
Sundays, than on any one of the six week-days. 
Not that I make wry faces at my work. We are upon 
the very best of terms with each other. Indeed, 
I might in this case adapt to my own uses the fine 
old chivalrous sentiment, and say, — 

I should not love thee, Work, so well, 
Loved I not Sunday more. 

My selfish delight in Sunday is, that I am not 
compelled to do any work on that day, if I do not 
wish it, and that I ought not if I would ; but there 
is a joy beyond this in seeing others going out for 
their Sunday holidays, in their best clothes, looking 
clean, and bright, and fresh, and whatever Mr. Lamb 
may say to the contrary, with a keen sense of the 
coming enjoyment written on their faces. I like to 
speculate on what they are going to do, as I see 
them starting when the morning air is fresh and 



LOVE OF FLOWERS, 269 

the sun not very high above the house-tops, 
wondering whether they are going to see their 
old parents in the country (mayhap in the Work- 
house) or a daughter in service, or only to get 
a little fresh air away from the smoke of London. 
And there were other pleasant and suggestive 
sights as seen from my chamber-windows, not the 
least of which was this : — I was wont to see on 
Sunday mornings, in the bright summer-time, a 
little stream of people flowing, under an archway, 
from Lincoln's Inn Fields towards Covent Garden, 
and returning by the same channel. They went 
empty-handed and they returned full ; each one, 
man or woman, carrying — I might almost write 
hugging — a pot of flowers ; a geranium, a fuchsia, 
a verbena, or some other freely-blossoming plant. 
It mystified me for some time ; but I learnt after- 
wards that there was an early sale of flowers on 
Sunday mornings in Covent Garden, and that 
purchases were to be made more cheaply at that 
hour than at any other. And it pleased me to 
think that a part of the wages paid on Saturday 
evening had been put aside for these Sunday- 
morning purchases ; and though this buying and 
selling might, in the eyes of rigid Sabbatarians, be 



2 70 AEST. 

held, in some sort, as a violation of the Fourth 
Commandment, I could not help thinking that the 
Recording Angel might well drop a tear upon the 
page that registered the offence. For the love of 
flowers, especially in sorely-tried Londoners, is a 
virtue in itself; and it greatly engenders Rest. 

I would recommend every man, in the autumn 
of his life, to take to gardening, if he has not 
already experienced its pleasures. Of all occupa- 
tions in the world it is the one which best combines 
repose and activity. It is rest-in-work or work-in- 
rest. It is not idleness ; it is not stagnation — and 
yet it is perfect quietude. Like all things mortal, 
it has its failures and its disappointments, and there 
are some things hard to understand. But it is 
never without its rewards. And, perhaps, if there 
were nothing but successful cultivation, the aggre- 
gate enjoyment would be less. It is better for the 
occasional shadows that come over the scene. The 
discipline, too, is most salutary. It tries one's 
patience and it tries one's faith. The perpetual 
warfare, that seems ever to be going on between 
the animal and the vegetable world, is something 
strange and perplexing. It is hard to understand 
why the beautiful tender blossoms and the delicate 



GARDENING. 271 

fresh leaflets of my rose-trees should be covered 
with green flies and destroyed as soon as they are 
born. It is a mystery which I cannot solve — but I 
know that there is a meaning in it, and that it is all 
decreed for good, only that I am too ignorant to 
fathom it. And even in the worst of seasons there 
is far more to reward and encourage than to dis- 
hearten and to disappoint. There is no day of the 
year without something to afford tranquil pleasure 
to the cultivator of flowers, something on which the 
mind may rest (using the word in its double sense) 
with profit and delight. If there is no new surprise, 
no fresh discovery for you, there is always some- 
thing to be done. "The garden is a constant 
source of amusement to us both," wrote Dr. Arnold 
in one of his delightful letters — he was writing of 
himself and wife; " there are always some little 
alterations to be made, some few spots where an 
additional shrub or two would be ornamental, 
something coming into blossom ; so that I can 
always delight to go round and see how things are 
going on." In the spring and summer there is 
some pleasure-giving change visible every morning, 
something to fulfil and something to excite expec- 
tation. And even in the winter, flower-culture has 



272 REST. 

its delights. If you have a green-house or con- 
servatory, no matter how small, you have an 
indoors garden, in which you may watch the 
same changes and enjoy the same delights. And 
if you have not, you may still do something to 
preserve your nurslings during the rigours of 
the hybernal season. Indeed, there are few 
states of life, in which floriculture is not an 
available enjoyment. To rich and to poor it is 
a blessing equally accessible. " As gardening," 
it was observed by Sir William Temple, who 
has had a new lease of life in one of the best of 
Macaulay's Essays, "has been the inclination of 
kings and the choice of philosophers, so it has 
been the common favourite of public and private 
men, a pleasure of the greatest and the care of 
the meanest ; and indeed an employment and a 
possession for which no man is too high or too 
low." I am disposed, indeed, to think that to men 
of low estate it yields greater joys than to those 
who hail from high places. I have got a little 
garden about the size of a rich man's dining-table. 
I am as fond of it, and, when the roses are in 
bloom, as proud of it, too, as the Duke can be of 
his world-renowned Chatsworth. I do not suppose 



WIN DO W-GARDENING. 273 

that if I could bring as many acres as I please 
under floral cultivation, and have as many gardeners 
as I choose to hire, with another Paxton at the 
head of them, I should derive from them all a 
tenth part of the enjoyment that is now vouchsafed 
to me by my little strip of suburban soil. Indeed, 
in that ducal case, I should not be suffered to 
garden ; I must be gardened for : they would be 
the gardener's roses, not mine ; I should have merely 
the privilege of looking at them. And it is essential 
to any real enjoyment of a garden that you should 
be an autocrat in it, that you should do much of the 
work yourself, and have a particular knowledge of 
almost each individual flower. 

But there are lowlier gardeners even than I ; 
there are gardens to which my diminutive domain 
is a Chatsworth — gardens limited to the capacity 
of a window-sill. I honour those window-gardeners, 
especially those who dwell in towns ; in narrow 
streets or murky alleys ; and whose homes are 
made beautiful by the smiles of the flowers in their 
windows ; gardeners such as I have spoken of 
above, as seen from my windows in Lincoln's Inn, 
carrying their gardens in their hands, beautiful off- 
shoots of the great garden which ever flourishes 

18 



274 REST. 

between Long Acre and the Strand. And even of 
this window-gardening there are many degrees ; 
descending even down to one delicate plant, reared 
perhaps from a slip beneficently given by a neigh- 
bour, in a fragment of a broken water-jug. There 
seems to be something of the old Paradisiacal 
beatitude in these modest cultivations. I saw 
yesterday, as I journeyed homeward-bound, after 
my day's work, to the station, whence I take 
train to my suburb, a woman at a second-floor 
window in Westminster (it is a house ancient and 
decrepit, doubtless doomed to speedy deletion) 
amidst a perfect Eden of many-coloured and many- 
shaped flowers and creepers, picking off the dead 
leaves here and there. Neither youth nor beauty 
physically belonged to her ; but the picture was 
not without a suggestiveness of youth and beauty ; 
for the love of flowers keeps the heart young, and 
the greater the difficulty of indulging that love the 
greater the moral beauty of success in the culti- 
vation of a purifying taste. I could readily 
associate with it the idea of a back -ground, 
behind that festooned window, in which, not- 
withstanding all the ordinary troubles and disturb- 
ances of metropolitan work, there is, at appointed 



STATESMANSHIP IN THE GARDEN. 275 

times, a fine air of repose — a soothing benignity 
of Rest * 

But I am minded, having thus spoken of these 
lower strata of floriculture, to return for a little 
space to the higher. If I were to give way to the 
inclination to discourse upon this subject, and to 
illustrate it by examples drawn from ancient and 
modern history, showing how the greatest men of 
all ages have sought and found Rest in the con- 
templation of fields and flowers — the inexhaustible 
works of that benignant Nature, which " nevei 
doth betray the heart that is her own " — I should 
require more sheets than I can find pages for my 
commentary. But I have been recently reading 
Lord Russell's Life of Charles Fox, and I do not 
know 7 any more beautiful illustration of the love of 
Rest than is to be found in the story of the great 
statesman's retirement and the correspondence 
which accompanies it : — " At a period," writes 
Lord Russell, " when the prospects of office nearly 
vanished from his sight, when calumny loved to 

* Since this was written, I have found a charming illustration of 
window-gardening in that unfinished work of Charles Dickens, which 
it so saddens one to read — the window-garden cultivated by the 
retired naval lieutenant in Staple Inn, who "thought he'd feel his 
way to the command of a limited estate by beginning in boxes." 



276 REST. 

paint him as a man of disordered ambition and 
criminal designs, he was busy in the study of 
Homer, or lounging carelessly through his garden 
and expressing to his beloved nephew the full 
sense of his happiness and content. The trees and 
the flowers, the birds and the fresh breezes, gave 
him an intense enjoyment, which those who knew 
his former life of politics and pleasure could hardly 
have imagined. To the capacious benevolence 
which longed to strike the chain from the African 
slave, he joined a daily practice of all the charities 
of life and a perception of the beautiful in nature, 
in literature and in art, which was a source of con- 
stant enjoyment. With a simplicity of manners 
rare in great statesmen, he united views the most 
profound, and a feeling heart which calumny could 
not embitter, nor years make cold, nor the world 
harden." The enjoyment of rest, which he derived 
from the sights and sounds of nature, from the 
beauty of the flowers and the songs of the birds, 
was intense ; and with this went hand-in-hand the 
cultivation of literature, especially in its less 
laborious forms. He was writing history, but he 
turned aside to revel in poetry ; and from his 
poetical studies he was diverted, at times, by his 



CHARLES FOX IN RETIREMENT. 277 

inquiries as to the season of nightingale-singing in 
different parts of the country. But, in the midst 
of all this, he had his misgivings. He could not 
help those qualms of conscience which rose up at 
odd times, and suggested that he ought to be at 
work again. 

Take the following from one of his letters in 
1795, as illustrative of the great struggle within 
between the sense of duty and the longing for 
Rest : — " As to myself, I grow every day to think 
less of public affairs ; possibly your coming home 
and taking a part in them might make me again 
more alive about them, but I doubt even that. 
The bills of this year appear to me to be a finish- 
ing stroke to everything like a spirit of liberty ; 
and though the country did show some spirit whilst 
they were depending, yet I fear it is only a tempo- 
rary feeling which they have quite forgotten. I 
wish I could be persuaded that it is right to quit 
public business, for I should like it to a degree 
that I cannot express ; but I cannot yet think that 
it is not a duty to persevere. One may be of 
opinion that persevering is of no use ; but ought a 
man who has engaged himself to the public to 
trust so entirely to a speculation of this sort as to 



278 REST. 

go out of the common road, and to desert (for so it 
would be called) the public service ? .... I 
think it can scarcely be right. But as for wishes, 
no one ever wished anything more. I am per- 
fectly happy in the country. I have quite re- 
sources enough to employ my mind, and the 
great resource of all, literature. I am fonder 
of literature every day." — [April 12, 1795.] 
And again, some years later : — " My feeling is 
this — that notwithstanding nightingales, flowers, 
literature, history, &c, all which, however, I con- 
ceive to be good and substantial reasons for 
staying here, I would nevertheless go to town if 
I saw any chance of my going being serviceable 
to the public, or (which, in my view of the case, is 
the same thing) to the party ; which I love both as 
a party, and on account of many of the principal 
individuals who compose it. I feel myself quite 
sure that this is not now the case ; and that if I 
were to go the best I could hope for would be that 
I should do no mischief." — [April 19, 1801.] The 
love of repose, of flowers and singing-birds, had 
grown upon him in the interval, but still ever 
and anon came goadings of self-reproach, and 
the much-coveted rest seemed to be continually 



SACRIFICES OF PUBLIC LIFE. 279 

slipping away from him. Thus, three years after- 
wards, he wrote : — " I am going up to town to- 
morrow, to stay 1 know not how many weeks. I 
dislike it to a degree you can hardly conceive, but 
I feel it is right, and resolve to do it handsomely 
.... Nightingales not come yet, and it will be 
well, if I do not quite miss hearing them this 
spring ; but I will do it so handsomely that I hope 
you will hear from your other correspondents that 
I have quite turned my mind to politics again, 
and am as eager as in former days. Pray remem- 
ber to inquire at what time nightingales usually 
appear and sing where you are." — [April 9, 1804.] 

There is something very pleasant in this last 
touch of nature. The nightingales again ! What 
a change from those soft songsters to the obstre- 
perousness of the House of Commons. There are 
many, doubtless, whom we are wont, in these days, 
to think self-seeking and ambitious, because they 
continue to take part in the strife of public affairs, 
even when health and strength are failing and the 
voice is growing weak. We seldom take account 
of the sacrifices which they make. How many 
would give up place and power if they did not feel 
within them a strong sense of duty, compelling 



280 rest: 

them to listen to the calls of their country. No 
one, who has tried both, doubts for a moment that 
Literature is more delightful than Politics. What 
Rest our two great party -leaders must have found 
in their Homeric studies and translations. What 
repose must have been the lot of that other states- 
man who wrote the Life of Fox above quoted, and 
that other life, in which he passed from politics to 
poetry, and manifested as keen an appreciation of 
the one as of the other. And who can fathom the 
depths of that intense amusement and recreation 
which another party-leader, sui generis, must have 
experienced, when he hoaxed and hocussed the 
world by publishing a fashionable novel, intended 
to satirise the perverted literary taste and to gauge 
the literary flunkyism of the age ? I think it must 
have added half-a-dozen good working-years to 
his life. He has achieved many successes, but 
none equal to this last. I do not say that I 
applaud it. He had before laid bare the rotten- 
ness of party politics, and it was still less pleasant 
to see the literary criticism of the nineteenth century 
thus shown to be a pretentious sham. But it will 
have its uses. My roses are not less sweet because 
the soil from which they grow is manured with 



KNOWING THE WORST. 23 1 

the vilest offal. If this stupendous hoax, which 
must have shaken the sides of Beaconsfield right 
merrily, should, as we apprehend it will, teach 
criticism a little more caution and conscientious- 
ness, it will not have been played out in vain. 

I have spoken, incidentally above, of the Rest 
which comes from knowing or suffering the worst 
— the quiet that follows an explosion. It is like 
the stillness now succeeding the thunderstorm, 
amidst which some of these lines have been written 
in the early morning. Almost every one, in some 
shape or other, has experienced, after a long period 
of painful doubt and suspense and anxiety — of 
those fears which cling to you in the day, which 
haunt your sleep, and oppress you with deadly 
sickness at the " shuddering dawn" — the infinite 
relief of the dreaded IT having actually come upon 
you. There is an end, then, of all your strugglings 
to escape your doom — all your writhings and 
wrestlings — all the miserable turmoil and excite- 
ment of battle with an impending fate. I have 
heard that men whose business affairs have been 
in an embarrassed state for months and years, 
have felt, w r hen the " smash " came at last, a 
quietude of spirit, a repose of mind, such as they 



282 REST. 

had not felt for a long and weary time. The worst 
had come ; and bankruptcy itself was not so bad 
as the fear of bankruptcy. I have seen, indeed, 
with my own eyes, men who had shrunk and 
shrivelled into an extreme state of tenuity, who 
had grown pale and wrinkled and care-worn, 
hollow-eyed, and dragged-mouthed, under the 
pressure of their difficulties, make their appear- 
ance, after a little space in the Fleet Prison, or 
some kindred institution, quite sleek and rosy 
and bright-faced, jaunty and debonnaire in their 
manner, ten years younger every way, as though 
the worst had come upon them and there was 
nothing now to be feared. Of course, this indicates 
a certain obtuseness of conscience and want of 
sympathy with others, in favour of which I have 
nothing to say. I am only speaking of the Rest 
that ensues from the IT having come upon us. I 
can easily imagine, too, that an offender against 
the laws of God and man, endeavouring to escape 
from the pursuing hand of Justice, might feel 
infinite relief when the hand has been laid on him 
and he can no longer evade its grasp. I think that 
wretched Falkland — rare product of the genius of 
William Godwin — that typical man, vain fugitive 



KNOWING THE WORST. 283 

from a remorseless and untiring Nemesis, must have 
rejoiced when the terrible pursuit was at an end. 
Even death itself has less terror than the perpetual 
uplooking at the Damoclean sword impending 
above one's head. It is related in cotemporary 
annals of the Great Indian rebellion, that, on more 
than one occasion, there was a sense of infinite 
relief after the storm had burst, and that, when 
the mutinous sepoys were everywhere surging 
around our Christian people, there was less misery 
in the knowledge of the actual present, than in the 
vague apprehension of the impending evil. 

It was in some mood of this kind that a dear 
friend, who, with the best intentions in the world, 
was always in trouble — one of those men who 
believe every one and everything, who are never 
to be convinced by any failures or misfortunes, 
who can never profit by experience or grow wise 
by suffering, but go on to the end, with unfailing 
trust in humanity, once wrote, on what he thought 
the eve of a crisis, which never came after all — for 
though some friends misled, it cannot be said 
betrayed him, others were staunch to the last ; and 
his faith in his fellow-men was not found to be 
ill-bestowed : — 



284 REST. 

" Rest ! — Yes ; a prison it may be. 'Tis well ! 
I have fought the battle long, and I have lost — 
Trusted my friends, and counted not the cost 
Of this blind faith in others. So I fell. 
And now that I have long been tempest-tost, 
I find my haven gladly in a cell. 
Water and bread, and just a little light, 
And air it may be, and full leave to pray, 
And I shall not much care for Man's despite, 
Waiting, in God's good time, a better day — 
Better to lay one's arms down and to wait, 
Than to fight on, sore- spent, all gashed and gory ; 
For the time cometh, be it soon or late, 
When perfect Rest is link'd with perfect Glory." 

I have a few words more to say in conclusion. 
There is something very soothing and solacing, 
amidst the cares and distractions, the ceaseless 
goings-to-and-fro of active life, in the thought of 
some day being able to lay down one's burdens 
and to cease from the strenuous business to which 
one has been harnessed for long years — to make 
over the traces and the collar and the reins, which 
one has worn so long, and the bit one has champed 
for nearly half-a-century, — to a younger and 
stronger horse, and to go out quietly to grass. 
And yet there are some men who shrink from the 
thought — who have a vague presentiment that if 
the harness cease to brace them up any longer, 
they will fall down by the way-side and die. I 



SUFERANNUA TION. 285 

think it is a miserable mistake. Every man should 
listen to the warnings which benignant Nature is 
continually uttering to him. Whether in the 
autumn of life we are cautioned now and then to 
pause,* or whether in the winter of life we are told 
that the time has come for us to cease altogether 
from work, we should never reject those prompt- 
ings. The time must come when younger men 
will do our work better, and, if we remain still at 
the grindstone, we shall be little more than cum- 
berers of the earth. Nay, we may be something 



* Whilst I am correcting the proofs of this essay, I read in 
one of the daily papers this gratifying intelligence : — "The Prime 
Minister is not ill, still less has he suffered what can be called ' a 
relapse,' however 'slight.' He has simply been conscious that those 
were right who advised a little rest after recent hard labours, if he 
wished actually to avoid any return of indisposition which has before 
been induced by overwork. And so successful has been the resort 
to repose, that he will probably be in his place again to-day, or at 
the latest to-morrow, in the full enjoyment of that excellent health 
which all have noticed recently. " Here, indeed, is an example to 
lesser men. "A stitch in time saves nine," in your constitution as 
well as in your coat. It is true wisdom to take heed of these slight 
warnings. The hardest worker in high place that I ever knew, 
having rejected some timely admonitions of this kind, was mercifully 
laid aside by a broken head in the hunting- field, and compelled to 
cease from the labour of years. And now he has gone back to 
the councils of the nation, all the better for that disaster in the 
field. 



236 REST. 

worse — miserable spectacles of decay, not even 
stately ruins. Shall we cling thus to a mere 
mockery and make-belief of work — sorry " drivellers 
and shows " — w T ith dim eyes, and palsied hands and 
vagrant memories ? Let us take our pensions 
thankfully in good time ; let us be content to be 
superannuated ; let us go cheerfully into retirement 
before people say that we ought to be kicked into 
it. At the close of life we ought to be left to our 
repose — to have time to take account of eternity. 
To work after we have ceased to be good workmen 
is only to take away so much from the good work 
already done. We may then reverse the words of 
the aphorism above cited, and say, " Orare est 
laborare? We are never too old to pray. Let us 
be thankful that we have time and repose to do it ; 
and hopefully wait until the summons comes — 
" Well done, thou good and faithful servant, enter 
into thy rest." 

It is only through the gates of death that 
we can grope our way to the fulness of repose. 
Let us then pause and make our houses ready, 
while there is time still left. It is not good to 
be stricken down in the midst of the great battle, 
as was he of whom erst I wrote : — 



THE BATTLE WITH TIME. 287 

His life was one grand battle with old Time. 

From morn to noon, from noon to weary night, 

Ever he fought as only strong men fight ; 
And so he passed out of his golden prime 

Into grim hoary manhood ; and he knew 

No rest from that great conflict, till he grew 
Feeble and old, ere years could make him so. 

Then on a bed of pain he laid his head, 
As one sore-spent with labour and with woe ; 

" Rest comes at last ; I thank thee, God," he said. 
Death came ; upon his brow laid chilly hands, 

And whispered, "Vanquished!" But he gasped out, "No, 
I am the Victor now; for unto lands 

Where Time's dark shadow cannot fall, I go." 

Ay, but whither ? It is ill thus to die with the 
harness on one's back and the battle-axe in one's 
hand. Better to lay them down ere the dark 
shadow falls ; and, resting as best we may upon 
earth, pass away into the Perfect Rest. 

[August, 1870.] 



THE END. 



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